Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, one of the largest individual campaign donors in Arizona, teamed up with Sen. Mark Kelly on Saturday to support Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate Tim Walz at a Democratic phone banking event in Maryvale.
“Arizona made a difference in 2020. In 2024, it will be razor thin,” Pritzker told a crowd of about 100 people in a small campaign office. “Everything we care about is under siege every day by a racist, misogynist, homophobic, xenophobic – I have a few other words – former President of the United States and his MAGA extremists, including Kari Lake. And we can’t let them win in 2024.”
Pritzker, a billionaire tied to the Hyatt fortune, is listed as the third-largest donor on the state’s campaign finance site, with an $850,000 contribution to the Think Big America – AZ PAC. The PAC then donated $512,000 to Arizona for Abortion Access, the coalition behind Proposition 139, which aims to enshrine the right to abortion in the state constitution.
Some of his donations have also gone to the Arizona List, which supports female candidates, and to Save Our Schools groups. Pritzker’s cousin, John A. Pritzker, has also contributed $500,000 to PAC for America’s Future in Arizona, which funds Democratic candidates.
Harris and Walz want to “ensure that you not only have the right to abortion, but also protections for contraception and IVF,” he said.
Pritzker touted Harris’ idea of an “opportunity economy” and said success shouldn’t just happen for “hedge fund magnates.” While it is true that he is a billionaire, he continued, “I tried to raise taxes on myself and all the rich people” to help “working families.”
“I believe that collectively we can win this election,” he said. But the small margin with Trump is “the reason why we should all vote.”
“This isn’t rocket science. If it were, I could help,” Kelly, a former Space Shuttle commander, told the crowd. “This is about one thing. Which side, which team, which campaign is working harder than the other?”
Both Kelly, D-Ariz, and Pritzker were on Harris’ short list for vice president before she chose Walz.
Democrats are trying to increase voter turnout
Pritzker’s prediction that Harris and Walz would win Arizona in November was met with cheers from the crowd at the field office near 52nd Avenue and Thomas Road. But with a recent poll showing that Donald Trump may be expanding his lead in the state, Democrats still have significant work ahead of them.
A poll from USA Today and Suffolk University showed Trump in the lead with 48%, compared to Harris’s 42%, with a margin of error of 4.4%. Less than half of Latino voters in the poll expressed support for Harris, while 35% backed Trump.
About half of the event’s attendees turned out to join Kelly and other officials, including his wife, former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, who was injured in a 2011 mass shooting, New Mexico Congresswoman Teresa Fernandez, and Yassamin Ansari, the Democratic nominee for third place in Arizona. Congressional district. Several dozen others were party volunteers who had planned a beating event, but had opted for a telephone campaign because of the record heat. The goal was to increase Latino support for Harris and Walz.
Paty Bishop, a 55-year-old Phoenix resident and Army veteran, was one of the phone volunteers and said she was voting for the first time this year.
“I have to support women,” she said. “We already know what Donald Trump has to offer. I don’t like what he says.”
Immigration a top concern
The event came a day after Harris toured the southern border in Douglas, where she vowed to continue President Joe Biden’s relatively new policy barring asylum seekers who enter the country illegally from staying in the United States. Harris wants to boost voters’ confidence in her ability to handle border issues after record numbers of migrants have entered the country since 2021 under the Biden administration.
Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent in Pritzker’s home state of Illinois to cover the costs of tens of thousands of newcomers, including thousands bused into the state as part of a program initiated by Texas Governor Greg Abbott.
While Pritzker told The Arizona Republic he doesn’t believe the migrants should have stayed in Texas, the busing program was “inhumane,” sending people “to Chicago in the middle of winter wearing sandals and T-shirts.”
Harris has done “a pretty good job” negotiating with Central and South American countries to slow migration, although “there was still a whole group of people coming to the border,” he said.
Both he and Kelly criticized Trump for deliberately sabotaging a border bill in Congress for political gain. Kelly added that Trump would be much worse for Latinos.
“If you are a Latino voter, I hope you would see that Donald Trump wants to deport your family members, friends and neighbors because of the color of their skin and where their heritage lies,” Kelly said. “And Kamala Harris cares about people.”
One visitor who came to Kelly, 39-year-old Natividad Chavez of Phoenix, expressed concern that Trump “doesn’t want too many immigrants here.”
Chavez believes Harris will take the opposite route, allowing undocumented immigrants to work or perhaps even granting them amnesty, she said.
After the speakers ended, several pro-Palestinian supporters unfurled banners and began shouting, prompting security personnel to roughly escort them out.
This article originally appeared in the Arizona Republic: Illinois Governor Campaigns for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in Arizona