Arizona’s Trump Wave Wasn’t Enough to Save Kari Lake
One thing that nearly everybody agreed upon in the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election is that it would be close. That proved wrong, as you may have heard. Former and now future President Donald J. Trump slashed into Democratic margins in blue states, won the popular vote, and carried every swing state by convincing margins. And in no battleground did he win as substantially as he did in Arizona. In the home state of Sen. John McCain and a purported stronghold of #NeverTrump Republicans, the Donald ran up a margin of victory of over 5 percentage points. It was a comparable win to what Harris achieved in Virginia, Minnesota, and New Jersey, all of which President Joe Biden carried effortlessly in 2020.
Those of the more glass-half-empty school of thought, however, might have noticed something else: Downballot Republicans were unable to fully capitalize on Trump’s success. This represents a major change from the previous two presidential elections. In 2016 and 2020, only a single state voted differently for president than it did for Senate. That was Maine in 2020, where Republican Sen. Susan Collins, a popular moderate, won reelection.
Amid Trump’s 2024 victory, however, Democrats have won four Senate seats in states Trump carried: Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada, and Arizona. Republicans came away from the 2024 election with a comfortable 53-seat Senate majority, but it could very easily have been 57 seats. And of all of these races, Arizona stands out as the most glaring loss.
Republicans in the Grand Canyon State, it must be said, have been having a poor run of Senate races. They’ve now lost no fewer than four special and regular Senate elections in eight years: The last time they were victorious was Sen. John McCain’s final reelection in 2016. But two factors make this year’s defeat the most stinging.
Firstly, the political winds were as favorable for Republicans as they’ve been for a long time. Trump is the first Republican to win the popular vote in two decades, and he carried Arizona by an even larger margin than he did in 2016.
Secondly, Arizona’s new senator-elect, Rep. Ruben Gallego, is nobody’s idea of a moderate. A member of the congressional progressive caucus until he left in the lead-up to the election, Gallego’s entry into the race was predicated on liberal outrage at Democratic Sen. Kyrsten Sinema’s refusal to nuke the Senate’s filibuster rule to pass hard-left priorities. The New York Times, hardly an ideological opponent, noted that Gallego had a “reputation as a blunt-spoken liberal who is politically in tune with young progressives and lacerates his opponents with profane social media posts.”
How could Arizona voters reelect Trump, and at the same time elevate someone who believes such antithetical things to him? Many on social media have insisted that it simply isn’t possible. The question is fair, and deserves a serious answer.
ABC News’ exit poll provides some hints. According to them, Vice President Kamala Harris carried Arizona Latinos over Trump by a 13-percentage-point margin, 55 percent to 42 percent. Gallego beat Lake with those same voters by a 24-percentage-point margin, 61 percent to 37 percent, however. This was a significantly larger gap than was seen among white voters, which gave Trump a net 13-percentage-point margin (56 percent to 43 percent) while only backing Lake by 7 percentage points (53 percent to 46 percent). That is to say, Lake seems to have run the furthest behind Trump with Latino voters.
We don’t have to take their word for it, though. The most Latino county in Arizona is Santa Cruz, nestled along the U.S.-Mexico border in the far south of the state. Historically extremely Democratic, over 80 percent of its residents are Latino. Home state scion McCain lost it to President Barack Obama by 31 percentage points in the 2008 presidential election, and 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney did even worse. In 2016, Trump failed to win even 24 percent of the vote here.
But by 2024, Latino support for Trump had surged. Harris only defeated the new president-elect here by an anemic 19 percentage points. Gallego, however, beat Lake by a much more typical 30 percentage points. There’s a perfectly anodyne explanation — many Latinos, who have always voted for Democrats in the past, were willing to cross the aisle and take a chance on Donald Trump this year. They didn’t vote Republican for other offices because… they aren’t Republicans, at least not yet.
The Gallego Arizona voters saw on the campaign trail was not the Bernie Sanders acolyte who once called himself a “true progressive voice in Congress.” His first Spanish-language ad promoted border security, despite the fact that he previously opposed and mocked Trump’s signature border wall and accused him of “scapegoating immigrants.” His ads highlighted his biography, notably growing up poor to a single mother in Chicago and serving in the Marines.
According to CBS News, “Gallego focused on bringing his campaign to Latino voters — sometimes, without talking about politics at all. His campaign hosted rodeos, boxing match watch parties, and carne asada cookouts. His team took food to construction shift workers at work sites after they’d clocked out in the early morning.” Notably, Gallego also picked a fight with progressive activists by denigrating their usage of the word “Latinx” to describe Latinos. In this way, Gallego was able to project moderate aesthetics without compromising his left-wing policies.
Republican candidate Kari Lake was unable to effectively respond to Gallego’s convenient evolution. Coming off her narrow defeat in the 2022 gubernatorial election, Lake began the race defined negatively in the eyes of voters, and proved unable to shake the perception. She was badly outspent on the airwaves, and the refusal of Sen. Mitch McConnell’s super PAC to assist did little to help matters. Lake closed well and seemed to have momentum in the final days of the race, but it proved to be too little, too late.
Santa Cruz is a small county that did not cast any great proportion of Arizona’s votes, but the dynamics at play there are applicable generally, and one can find a similar electoral phenomenon in other states. Take Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s successful reelection, for example. Running in a much redder state than Arizona, Cruz defeated Democrat Colin Allred by just under 9 percentage points, a larger than expected margin that was nevertheless underwhelming compared to Trump’s 14-percentage-point victory. In the heavily Latino Rio Grande Valley, Trump carried traditionally blue counties such as Cameron, Hidalgo, and Webb that haven’t supported a GOP candidate for president since 2004, 1972, and 1912 respectively. Cruz lost all three, though he did so by less than usual for a Republican.
In New York state, far-left Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won reelection to her Hispanic-majority district 69 percent to 31 percent. But according to one preliminary analysis, Harris only beat Trump with those same voters 65 percent to 33 percent. Ocasio-Cortez herself was understandably confused by this result, and took to social media to ask constituents who voted for her and Trump to explain their reasons. “It’s really simple… trump and you care for the working class,” said one representative response.
The reasons for Lake’s defeat, in summary, are both less nefarious and more troubling than many Republicans realize. Were it merely a matter of stolen elections and fake ballots, Trump (who these alleged saboteurs foolishly allowed to win Arizona, for some reason) could direct his administration to prosecute the people responsible and put an end to it. But if significant segments of the Trump coalition are not sold on the Republican Party, it will take serious introspection and effort to win them over, and wishing the problem away is not going to fix it.
People are strange. Most Americans vote one party line or the other, but there are a lot of idiosyncratic swing voters that make decisions partisans find irrational or unbelievable. Trump has a unique, personalist appeal that Republicans have thus far been unable to replicate, and the party cannot count on him forever. They need to figure out how to appeal to his base of support and keep them engaged. After all, 2026 is just around the corner.
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