Why Arizona Is Looking Trumpier in 2024
Arizona was one of the closest states in the country in 2020, with Joe Biden’s tiny margin of victory tipping the state to Democrats for the first time since 1996 — and seeding a million Republican conspiracy theories. If polls are to be believed, things might not be quite so tight this time around. While Kamala Harris is within shouting distance of Donald Trump, polls show the former president with a slight but persistent lead. And the headwinds of inflation, immigration, and Arizona’s ancestral conservatism are working against Harris. I spoke with Yvonne Wingett Sanchez, a Washington Post reporter who has long covered Arizona politics, about why she thinks the Trump campaign is poised for a strong showing there.
Polling averages show Trump up about two points on Harris in Arizona, and it’s seen as maybe the hardest of the seven key swing states for her to win. I’m wondering if this thinking aligns with what you’re seeing on the ground in your reporting. Do you feel the momentum is going Trump’s way?
Yeah. I think the vibe is definitely very pro-Trumpy. Even a lot of Republicans, including some McCain Republicans that I’ve talked to, who weren’t real big fans and really aren’t still big fans of Trump these days — they don’t like the way Kamala Harris was anointed, essentially. Between that and concerns over the economy, a lot of them are just sort of holding their noses and voting for Trump. I also think this effort to get out low-propensity voters is actually coming to fruition in a really big way. Not just by Turning Point, which is based in Arizona and knows the state probably better than it knows any other swing state in the country, but by all these political groups that have been working on the ground over the last couple of years.
Most voters in Arizona vote early. It’s been that way for decades. We are a pioneer of early voting. If you just look at the returns and how heavily Republican they are, the pattern is very much a pre-2020 pattern where Republicans are dominating. No one knows how they voted, but you’ve got to think that a lot of those are going to be for Trump and down-ballot Republicans, and among the independent voters too. So just looking at the trend lines, Republicans are up, Democrats are down, independents are dramatically down. Those are going to be the deciders, and Republicans are feeling pretty good.
So there’s not much to like for Democrats to hang their hats on at this point.
Not yet. Obviously that could change. But given the registration advantage that Republicans have and just the vibe and the economy, I’m not convinced that Harris has closed the deal with these voters. They don’t seem to be as fired up as her campaign and national Democrats would have liked. They are definitely panicking. No one can figure out what’s going on. Most people think that Democrats are holding onto their ballots because the ballots are longer than they’ve been in about 20 years — we have two pages front and back. It is a daunting, time-consuming task. But all that’s to say, Republicans are getting theirs back — they’re doing the job — and Democrats aren’t.
And that’s in part because Trump and the outside GOP groups have been very aggressive about touting early voting this time around as opposed to four years ago, right?
I get mailers almost every day from the state party, and from — I think it’s the American Majority PAC. I put that in my story the other day. The early voting game is insanely successful. They clearly learned their lesson from 2022 and to some extent 2020.
In a lot of places, the Harris campaign has out-organized the Trump operation, which has largely been outsourced to super-PACs. You’re saying it’s the opposite there. I’ve been doing interviews with experts in swing states, and this is the first time I’ve heard that.
What I’m saying is that whatever is happening on the left doesn’t seem to be working yet. And Charlie Kirk’s organization is based in Arizona, and so I think that’s what makes it the outlier in these other states. They know Arizona very well. They’ve been here for more than a decade. They definitely see this election as their last stand. This election is either going to make or break Turning Point.
Arizona was the center of Trump’s conspiracy theories — the fake-electors scheme, the publicly funded election audit. And this all ended up with criminal charges against some of the electors and some Trump campaign officials. I wonder if the state GOP is going to be any more cautious about alleging fraud this time around, given the consequences? Or is it pretty much full steam ahead on that stuff?
There’s a couple of big things that I’ve been watching on this front. One of them is the state party chair, Gina Swoboda. She replaced Jeff DeWit, who was a Trump ally. He was forced out after Kari Lake secretly recorded him. Before that, it was Kelli Ward who went to great lengths to do what was asked of her by Trump and his allies and pushed the bounds, obviously. A lot of people might disagree with Swoboda’s policy, but when she has been asked previously to do things that she has deemed outside of the law, or not smart, or not ethical, she’s left the room. She has not done those things. And so I think she’s definitely going to be approaching this election cycle with an eye towards staying within the bounds of the law, not doing anything illegal, not filing frivolous litigation.
But there’s a whole other wing of the party that is going to be willing to do a lot of these other sorts of things. And I will give you an example. Some of the members who served as alternate electors in 2020 wanted to be renamed as electors again. The state party chair who chooses the electors said no. That was the first clear indication that she was not going to be screwing around. And it hasn’t made her many friends in the MAGA wing of the party, but I think it really gives an indication about where her head’s at.
And all Republicans will probably be fine with her tactics as long as they win.
They’ll love her for that.
These are the scenarios that Republicans are hoping for: There’s the pro-Trump wing, which hopes that Trump wins Arizona, Lake loses by a margin that’s too big to contest in a serious way, and Trump wins the presidency. And the anti-Trump Republican wing of the party hopes that Trump wins Arizona to put to rest his denialism, but loses nationally. And that Kari Lake loses by a big margin too large to contest.
One thing that does seem likely among those outcomes is Lake losing by quite a bit. She’s down significantly in most high-quality surveys. Why is she doing so badly compared to Trump? Does this say more about Ruben Gallego’s strength, her weakness, Trump’s strength, or some combination of all these?
It says everything about Kari Lake’s weakness. I think there are two or three big moments over the past year that have helped get her to where we think she is. And her team would acknowledge this — maybe not publicly, but certainly privately. The first one is that she spent way too much time at Mar-a-Lago. And she spent way too much time out of state at a very critical time; as Republicans were gearing up for the 2024 cycle, she was in Iowa. She was a surrogate for Trump in all these early states, but she wasn’t here. It led some MAGA Republicans, the people who know her best and the people who had been rooting for her, to believe that her bid for Senate was not as serious as it could be. And that helped lead to some mistrust about her intentions.
The second thing is she leaked that tape, or her allies leaked the tape of Jeff DeWit, trying to talk her out of running the race after she had just lost a statewide race. It was a huge miscalculation, because DeWit was a very early supporter of Trump’s in 2016. In fact, Trump tried to recruit DeWit to run against McCain in ’16. He was beloved by Trump supporters, and it really made a lot of people think, once again, she was in this more for herself and not for the greater cause. So that lost her some of the base.
And then she sort of flip-flopped on abortion. She went from supporting the 1864 territorial ban to just flipping on a dime as soon as Trump was supportive of eliminating that. And for a lot of Christian conservatives, that just provided more fodder to the question of, “Can we trust her?” Those are going to be the big themes I’ll look at if she loses. Some people will vote for her, and some will quietly vote for maybe the third party candidate. Other voters will not. They’ll just leave that part empty, and there will be an undervote in a way that maybe we haven’t seen.
And of course, there’s an abortion referendum on the ballot this year. Are there going to be a lot of voters who vote not to restrict abortion, but vote for Trump anyway, do you think?
I think the polling has shown that to be in a pretty strong position, although maybe not as strong of a position as some people suspect, had suspected. Arizona splits tickets all the time. That’s what we do, especially over the last decade.
One of the few places where that’s still common.
Right. It’s very, very common. And plus, we’ve got this strong libertarian streak, and Mormons who very much believe in free will. So while they may not completely agree personally with the policy, they tend to be of the mind that it’s not a good idea to have the government controlling your free will, your God-given right. That theme combined with the libertarian streak, combined with Trump’s support and the Republican Party just broadly not even getting involved in that issue — I think it’s probably poised for a win, in part because of Republican voters.
Officials have said that the vote count in Maricopa County, the most populous county by far, will take up to two weeks. This lag happens every time in Arizona. Can you explain why it takes so long?
It’s always been like that, and it’s mostly because we have a large number of voters who hang onto their ballots for a long time and don’t drop them off at polling sites until the days immediately before the election, or on Election Day. That means officials can’t even start processing those ballots until Election Day, until those boxes of ballots are transported back to central headquarters. They have to be taken out of envelopes, and signatures have to be verified before the votes can be counted. So it backlogs the whole process. And it’s really complicated in a state where more than 80 percent of voters vote by mail. So there’s a huge push to try to get people to return their ballots early — I woke up today to frantic messages from both parties, both major parties, county election officials, frantically telling people to return their ballots.
Why is it such a tradition to hold onto ballots that long?
I think it’s maybe some indecision, but also, voters are busy. They’ve got jobs. Now combine that with a two-sheet ballot, basically four pages front and back. For me personally, it took me two sessions to be able to work my way through that. And a normal person is not going to be as informed as we are on these things.
They’re going to have to Google stuff. They’re going to be texting friends saying, “What do I do on these judges? What about the school-board seat?” These are really complicated. They need time. You combine all those mitigating factors plus a new law that election workers have to actually hand-count the number of early ballots that were dropped off on Election Day — it adds time. That means we are going to be in this thing for the long haul. Trump only won in 2020 by 10,450 votes. If it’s that close this cycle, that means it goes to an automatic recount.
I’m sure the election officers must be thrilled with all this.
They actually are doing a pretty good job, I have to say. Their morale is still pretty high. People seem to be generally in a pretty good mood, despite some hiccups here or there. And the bad stuff hasn’t come yet, but they’re braced for it when it does.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.