U.S. Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris in Aston, Pennsylvania, on October 23, 2024, and U.S. President Donald Trump in Tucson, Arizona, on October 19, 2020.
Charlie Triballo | Mandel and | AFP | Getty Images
President-elect Donald Trump NBC News project that won Arizona, adding its 11 electoral votes to his column after narrowly losing to the president Joe Biden 2020.
Trump expected to defeat Vice President Kamala Harris The political landscape in Sun Belt states has undergone years of change since Trump defeated Hillary Clinton by 4 percentage points in 2016.
Since then, the once firmly Republican state has installed a Democratic governor, two Democratic senators and other statewide elected officials. Rapid growth in the Latino population and a revolt against Trump by some old-line Republicans have turned the once red state into a battleground. Biden’s victory in Arizona in 2020 was only the second time in 28 years that Arizona’s electoral votes went to a Democratic presidential candidate.
Still, many Democratic victories have come by narrow margins. Arizona is the second closest state in the 2020 presidential race in the United States, with Biden beating Trump by just 0.3 percentage points (10,457 votes).
The state then became the epicenter of Trump’s post-election campaign to spread baseless conspiracy theories that the election was stolen, claims that were eagerly embraced by the state’s Republicans – some of whom are campaigning for the 2022 midterm elections. Failed across the state.
In the 2024 presidential race, however, polling over the past few months has shown Trump with a slight advantage over Harris in Arizona, though generally still within the margin of error. But while Trump’s campaign in Arizona has largely outpaced the Harris campaign’s spending and organizing, Republicans did see a surge in voter registrations heading into a presidential election year.
The state is well-positioned to address two core issues of Trump’s campaign: the economy and immigration.
Both Harris and Trump visited the Arizona-Mexico border during their trips to the state this summer, when gas prices were among the highest in the nation. Still, Arizona remains one of Trump’s least-visited battlegrounds because of its geographical distance from most other battleground states.
