U.S Election

Trump wins Arizona in a clean sweep of the seven swing states

Author: Editors Desk Source: The Washington Post

November 10, 2024 at 05:39

Donald Trump at an October campaign rally in Prescott Valley, Arizona, alongside National Border Patrol Union members. (Caitlin O'hara/AFP/Getty Images)

President-elect Donald Trump is projected to defeat Vice President Kamala Harris in Arizona, according to the Associated Press. Border control was a key issue.

President-elect Donald Trump is projected to win the border state of Arizona, in what would be a clean sweep of the seven swing states in the U.S. presidential election, the Associated Press reports.

The win over Vice President Kamala Harris puts the state and its 11 electoral votes in the GOP’s column after President Joe Biden won it in 2020. That gives Trump 312 electoral votes to Harris’s 226.

The Biden victory in 2020 was only the second time since the 1940s that Democrats had succeeded in taking Arizona. In that election, Biden won by 10,000 votes, partly because of traction in Phoenix-based Maricopa County, where almost 6 in 10 voters reside, a big win for the Democratic Party despite Trump growing his popularity in the state’s rural areas compared with 2016.

Trump is ahead in Arizona this year by about 6 percentage points, with nearly 90 percent of the votes counted by early Sunday, giving him all seven battleground states, including Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina and Nevada.

The situation at the border was a key issue for some Arizona voters during this election. This year, the Trump campaign made immigration and the migrant crisis a central component of its campaign, pledging to expand the Border Patrol, for example.

In 2016, Trump beat Hillary Clinton by a narrower margin than in previous elections after losing voters in Maricopa County and in regions with other midsize cities such as Tucson.

As recently as 2012, Republicans had won Arizona by more than 200,000 votes.

In congressional elections, Arizona voters were waiting Saturday to see who would win three House races and its Senate contest; all those races were too close to call.