President-elect Donald Trump won the Arizona and NBC News projects and added 11 electoral votes to his column after narrowly losing the state to President Joe Biden in 2020.
Trump’s projected victory over Vice President Kamala Harris comes after years of a changing political landscape in the Sun Belt state, following Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton by four points in 2016.
Since then, the once firmly Republican Party-controlled state has appointed a Democratic governor, two Democratic senators and other statewide elected officials. A fast-growing Latino population and an anti-Trump rebellion among some longtime Republicans pushed the once-red state into battleground territory. And Biden’s victory in Arizona in 2020 marked only the second time in 28 years that electoral votes in Arizona went to the Democratic presidential candidate.
Yet many of those Democratic victories have come by the narrowest of margins. Arizona was the nation’s second-closest state in the 2020 presidential race, with Biden beating Trump by just 0.3 percentage points (10,457 votes).
The state subsequently became an epicenter of Trump’s post-election spread of baseless 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.
But in the 2024 presidential race, polls in recent months had given Trump a slight lead against Harris in Arizona, although this was generally still within the margin of error. But while Trump’s campaign in Arizona was largely spent and organized by the Harris campaign, Republicans did see a surge in voters ahead of the presidential election year.
And the state fit well with the two issues at the heart of Trump’s campaign: the economy and immigration.
This summer, Arizona saw some of the highest gas prices in the country, and both Harris and Trump visited the Arizona-Mexico border during visits to the state. Still, Arizona was one of the battleground states Trump visited least because it was geographically separated from most other battleground states.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
