Introduction

In this final post-election blog post, I am interested in exploring the outcome of my home state, Arizona, and analyzing how well both myself and others forecasted its results. Over the past semester, I have been following Harris and Trump’s respective campaigns within the state, and I am eager to finally share my findings. For the purposes of structuring this post, I will do the following:

1. Offer a brief summary of the state of Arizona — its demographics, its voting history in recent decades, its state- and local-level races, and other important bits of context.

2. Compare how well both myself and others forecasted Arizona’s presidential election results.

3. Discuss the ground-level campaigning in Arizona and how the candidates’ strategies differed.

4. Hypothesize how much of the campaign strategy and candidate quality of each party can explain the difference between the presidential forecasts for Arizona and the eventual outcome.

The code used to produce these visualizations is publicly available in my github repository and draws heavily from the section notes and sample code provided by the Gov 1347 Head Teaching Fellow, Matthew Dardet.

Arizona Summary

As the 16th most populous state in the United States, Arizona casts a non-trivial number of electoral votes each election cycle. For the 2024 presidential election, it will cast 11 electoral votes, 1 for each of its 2 senators and 9 representatives (Ballotpedia). While Arizona has historically voted Republican, it has grown increasingly purple in recent election cycles, and, in 2020, voted for a Democratic president for the first time since 1996.

Previous to the 2024 election, it was represented by the following:

• 1 Democratic governor
• 1 Democratic senator and 1 Independent senator (who caucused with Democrats)
• 6 Republican and 3 Democratic representatives
• A narrowly Republican State Senate and State House of Representatives

Given Arizona’s recent trend toward swing state status (its presidential popular vote margins went from +9.74 R to +3.54 R to +0.3 D between 2012 and 2020) and its divided state government, I suspected Arizona would be an interesting state to follow this election cycle.

Geographically, Arizona is dominated by the Phoenix metropolitan area, which, as of 2024, is home to roughly 4.777 million people, over 60% of Arizona’s total population of approximately 7.497 million people. For this reason, Maricopa County, the county in which Phoenix is located, has voted for Arizona’s presidential winner in every election cycle since 1956. The next largest county in Arizona is Pima County with slightly over 1 million residents. This county tends to vote more Democratically relative to Maricopa County and is home to the city of Tucson.

Below is a map of Arizona’s 2020 election results by county.

Demographically, according to Ballotpedia, the source of all the statistics from this section, about 32% of Arizona identifies as ethnically Hispanic. Roughly 54% of the state identifies as non-Hispanic White, about 5% identify as Black, about 4% identify as Native American and AAPI respectively, and roughly 3% identify as two or more races. This makes Arizona home to particularly large Latino and Native American populations. Additionally, roughly 17.5% of Arizona is 65 years of age or older and about 5% of its residents identify as members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, meaning that it has both a large retired and Mormon population

Apart from the 2024 presidential election, pundits across the United States were closely watching Arizona’s Senate contest between Republican Kari Lake and Democrat Ruben Gallego. Separately, of national interest was Proposition 139, an effort to expand abortion access in Arizona.

Forecast Comparisons

Sabato’s Crystal Ball of the Center for Politics rated Arizona as a lean Republican, whereas the Cook Political Report listed Arizona as a “toss-up.”

Almost universally across news platforms and forecasting models, Arizona was listed among the seven states identified as most likely to determine the election:

• Arizona
• Georgia
• Michigan
• Nevada
• North Carolina
• Pennsylvania
• Wisconsin

Ultimately, my final model from week 9 predicted an Arizona victory for Trump, him having a two-party vote share of 50.75% compared to Harris’s 49.25%.

I also had Trump winning Arizona in 73.2% of my simulations.

This was in line with FiveThirtyEight’s ultimate projection of Trump taking Arizona 51% to 49%. Nate Silver’s Silver Bulletin was more aggressive about Trump’s win, however, projecting a 5.3 percentage point margin for Trump, 52.65% to 47.35%.

Ultimately, Trump took the two-party presidential vote in Arizona 52.79% to 47.21%. Using data from The New York Times, we can see that Arizona saw rightward swings in each of its 15 counties, paricularly in the Santa Cruz, Yuma, Apache, and Navajo counties.

The Campaign in Arizona

To explore why it is that my forecast underestimated Trump’s victory margins in Arizona, I want to first reflect on Harris and Trump’s campaign strategies in Arizona.

According to campaign event tracker, VoteHub, since Biden’s departure from the race, Harris has held rallies in Arizona three times and Trump six times. Both, however, pored immense resources into the state, considering Arizona important for electoral victory.

Grace Monos and Gabrielle Wallace of Cronkite News highlighted key differences in the campaigns of each candidate in an article of theirs published the day after the election. The Harris campaign regularly had celebrities at its Arizona events, among them being Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Jessica Alba, and Eva Longoria. Alba and Longoria, specifically, spoke at a November 3rd “Latinos con Harris-Walz” event. At this event, they urged voters to support Harris, stressing topics like abortion, democracy, and women’s rights. In many ways, this event was emblematic of Harris’s broader strategy in Arizona: appealing to women in the state to stymie Trump’s inroads with Latino voters. While Democrats were hopeful that Arizona’s popular abortion proposition, which easily passed, would lead the Harris-Walz ticket to vicket, such was not the case.

Another central pillar of Harris’s campaign was her repeated suggestion of Trump being a threat to democracy. In Arizona, specifically, Harris welcomed endorsements from a variety of Republican poltiicans who agreed with her assessment, among them political bona fides like John McCain’s son, Jimmy McCain, and former Arizona Senator (and Latter-day Saint), Jeff Flake. Harris even appeared at an event with the Republican mayor of Mesa (another Latter-day Saint) to jointly declare Trump an existential threat to democracy.

While it is possible that Harris’s courting of Latter-day Saint voters may have helped her case (Nate Silver’s model underperformed for Trump the most in Utah), her efforts were ultimately insufficent given Trump’s clear win.

Many pundits nationally have ascribed Harris’s loss to an inability to connect with the working class. Her appeals to democracy and abortion, while perhaps resonant with women and college-educated voters, may have been insufficiently tangible for working-class voters concerned about inflation and illegal border crossings. Though Harris made a September stop in the border town of Douglas, Arizona to project her accomplishments in reducing illegal border crossings and drug trafficking, she could not change the narrative. Trump, on the other hand, made the economy and immigration the centerpieces of his campaign, calling Harris a failed “border czar,” and, at an October 24th rally in Tempe, promising the “largest deportation program in American history.”

The theory that working class voters were more persuaded by Trump’s campaign promises is certainly validated by the results in Arizona. Trump saw the largest shifts in the Santa Cruz, Yuma, Apache, and Navajo counties — the first two being working-class border towns and the latter two being largely impoverished counties with sizeable indigenous populations.

Lynn Vavreck, in her 2009 book, The Message Matters, names two different campaign strategies: clarifying and insurgent campaigns. Clarifying campaigns center discussion around the economy and are generally employed by the incumbent party in a good economy and the non-incumbent party in a poor economy. Insurgent campaigns, on the other hand, are employed by parties not experiencing the windfalls of a strong economy. These insurgent campaigns center issues that the public overwhelmingly supports and the competing candidate opposes or does not adequately represent.

In my view, Harris adopted an insurgent campaign and Trump a clarifiyng one. Despite Harris’s efforts to paint Trump as the progenitor of widespread inaccess to abortion and the violence of January 6th, two topics the public tends to not support Trump on, she ultimately could not overcome Trump’s economic appeals given her ties to Biden and the record inflation his administration saw, especially in Arizona, which saw above-average inflation.

Ruben Gallego’s 51.2% to 48.8% win over Kari Lake (as a two-party vote share), however, demonstrates that insurgent campaigns can be successful. By not campaigning with Harris, he successfully managed to insulate himself from the liabilities that the Biden administration incurred on the subject of inflation in a way Harris could not given her role as Vice President. Gallego, then, was able to forcefully criticize Kari Lake’s election denialism and general lack of governing experience, two matters of candidate quality in which she was widely considered deficient. Gallego’s win could also suggest weaknesses in Harris’s candidate quality or the existence of gender and racial bias.

To close, it is my belief that my forecast for Arizona underestimated Trump’s polling support because I failed to consider the significance of economic fundamentals, a subject Trump’s clarifying campaign prominently showcased and one that very well may have unravelled the Harris insurgent campaign.

Citations:

“Arizona.” Ballotpedia, ballotpedia.org/Arizona. Accessed 10 Dec. 2024.

“Arizona Presidential Election Results.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 5 Nov. 2024, www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/11/05/us/elections/results-arizona-president.html.

Monos, Grace, and Gabrielle Wallace. “2024 Presidential Election in Arizona: Kamala Harris, Donald Trump Battled for Crucial Swing State.” Cronkite News, 6 Nov. 2024, cronkitenews.azpbs.org/2024/11/05/arizona-2024-presidential-election-harris-trump-battle-crucial-swing-state/.

Morris, G. Elliott. “Who Is Favored to Win Arizona’s 11 Electoral Votes?” FiveThirtyEight, ABC News, 5 Nov. 2024, projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2024-election-forecast/arizona/.

“Presidential Campaign Events Tracker.” VoteHub Projects, 30 Oct. 2024, projects.votehub.com/pages/campaign-tracker.

Silver, Nate, and Eli McKown-Dawson. “Final Silver Bulletin 2024 Presidential Election Forecast.” Silver Bulletin, Silver Bulletin, 5 Nov. 2024, www.natesilver.net/p/nate-silver-2024-president-election-polls-model.

Vavreck, Lynn. The Message Matters: The Economy and Presidential Campaigns. Course Book, Princeton University Press, 2009.

Data Sources:

Data are from the US presidential election popular vote results from 1948-2024 and state-level polling data for 1968 onwards, courtesy of FiveThirtyEight.