US Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris in Aston, Pennsylvania, on October 23, 2024 and US President Donald Trump in Tucson, Arizona on October 19, 2020.Â
Charly Triballeau | Mandel Ngan | AFP | Getty Images
President-elect Donald Trump has won Arizona, NBC News projects, putting its 11 electoral votes in his column after he narrowly lost the state to President Joe Biden in 2020.
Trump’s projected victory over Vice President Kamala Harris comes after years of a shifting political landscape in the Sun Belt state, following Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton by 4 points in 2016.
Since then, the once firmly GOP-controlled state has put into office a Democratic governor, two Democratic senators and other statewide elected officials. A fast-growing Latino population and a revolt against Trump among some old-line Republicans put the once-red state into battleground territory. And Biden’s 2020 win in Arizona was just the second time in 28 years that Arizona’s electoral votes went to the Democratic presidential nominee.
Still, many of those Democratic victories have been by the slimmest of margins. Arizona was the second-closest state in the country in the 2020 presidential race, with Biden beating Trump by just 0.3 percentage points (10,457 votes).
The state then became an epicenter of Trump’s post-election spread of unfounded conspiracy theories about the election being stolen from him, with state Republicans eagerly embracing the claims — and some of those Republicans failing statewide in the 2022 midterm elections.
Yet in the 2024 presidential race, polling over the past several months had given Trump a slight edge against Harris in Arizona, though typically still within the margin of error. But while Trump’s campaign, for the most part, was largely outspent and out-organized in Arizona by the Harris campaign, Republicans did see a voter registration surge heading into the presidential election year.
And the state was a good fit for the two issues at the center of Trump’s campaign: the economy and immigration.
This summer, Arizona saw some of the highest gas prices in the nation, and both Harris and Trump made visits to the Arizona-Mexico border during visits to the state. Still, Arizona was among the battlegrounds Trump visited least, being geographically separated from most of the rest of the battlefield states.
