Arizona - 2024 Election Compendium

Topic: 2024 Election Analysis

Arizona 2024 Presidential Election Review

Author’s Note: All 2024 Election Reviews can be found here.

---

Outcome

Trump +5.5% (+187,382)

My Prediction

Trump +4.7% (+159,659)

---

Preface

Although it may not hold the most electoral votes of any of the battleground states, Arizona is symbolically ground zero of the election integrity crisis in America. President Trump was on his way to an Election Night reelection win on November 3, 2020, when suddenly, Fox News came in with the call of Arizona for Biden, with hardly any of the vote counted. Keep in mind, this wasn’t like when someone takes a whiff of exit polls in Massachusetts and makes a call as soon as polls close. This was and is a travesty.

Arizona is the most loyal of all Republican presidential states since the second half of the 20^th century. After supporting Democrat Harry Truman in 1948, the state (and Maricopa County) flipped for Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952 and failed to back the GOP nominee just one time between then and 2016 (1996, when Bill Clinton beat Bob Dole thanks to Perot, but still lost Maricopa County). Trump won the state and Maricopa County in 2016 despite having more enemies than friends in Arizona, but despite what turned out to be a record net new vote gain for any Republican both statewide and in Maricopa, Trump somehow “lost” the state (and Maricopa) to Joe Biden by 10,457 ballots in America’s 2020 quasi-election.

Multiple Republican factions make it difficult to run with party unity as a tailwind. There is a legacy faction of McCain Republicans (neocons), particularly in affluent portions of Maricopa County, who cross party lines out of spite, a true conservative (sarcasm) wing of Republicans, which is full of members who behave politically like their GOP-breakaway Utahn counterparts in that they’ll criticize the old establishment wing, but clutch their pearls over candidates who beat their own in primaries, and finally, Trump-style populists who want to burn the existing system to the ground and understandably struggle to collaborate with the two other groups who seem hellbent on destroying their outsider candidates. Those former two groups have made political life unnecessarily difficult for Kari Lake’s campaigns in 2022 and 2024.

Throughout the cycle, Arizona consistently ranked as the most likely Trump battleground win even according to mainstream pollsters. Arizona, with its prolific mail-in balloting and transparency-proof counting system, knows no margin too big to manipulate, so I took any pro-Trump or pro-Lake polling with a grain of salt. Ultimately, I figured Trump would carry the state because easier and less conspicuous ways to push Harris to 270 electoral votes existed without having to push back against the heavy rightward shift of the Hispanic working class in the Southwest, and letting the state go back where it belongs would get a lot of bad actors off the hook in Maricopa County while giving opportunity to manipulate down ballot races with fewer people standing in protest of a prolonged count since the presidency would be unimpacted. It turns out Arizona did get a lot of attention for its election administration, and none of it was good. I arrived at my prediction of Trump +4.7%, which turned out to be accurate to within 0.8% (my second most accurate battleground state prediction behind only Nevada by margin), by taking the average of my pessimistic model (Trump +1.4%) and the registration model (Trump +5.8%), and then because all 15 counties showed a GOP registration shift in the past four years, splitting the difference between the average and the registration model.

---

Analysis

· All 15 counties in Arizona showed a shift in registration toward the Republican Party from 2020 to 2024, moving the state from R+3.0% to R+6.8%. Yuma and Navajo Counties flipped to a Republican advantage, and the shift in Maricopa County more than doubled the previous GOP registration advantage in the county by raw numbers:

· Trump improved in all 15 counties both by percentage margin and by raw vote margin, as shown below:

· Maricopa County, unable to retain all its counterfeit 2020 ballots, flipped back to Trump, with the margin moving rightward by 116,624 ballots. Trump’s performance in Santa Cruz County, which is over 80% Hispanic, was the best for a GOP nominee since 1988 (16.9% improvement), as was his performance in Apache County (14.7% improvement), which is roughly three-quarters Native American. Key to Trump’s statewide triumph was his improvement in Maricopa (metro Phoenix) and Pima (metro Tucson) Counties, which make up three-quarters of the statewide vote together and improved by 136,066 ballots collectively from 2020:

· Trump’s gains, thanks to strong Republican turnout and improved support from Latinos and Native Americans, were strong in the outlying counties, where he grew his margins in them by 61,773 votes. His biggest gains in raw vote margin outside of Maricopa and Pima Counties were in Pinal (+14,299) and Yavapai (+8,704) Counties; his improvement in the outlying 13 counties was sizeable enough to have provided a winning margin inside 2 points even if Trump did not improve in the two largest counties:

· Harris gained ballots over Biden’s 2020 ballot counts in just one county – Pinal (+5,550). I have discussed my concerns with the county’s elections with Sheriff Mark Lamb, who ran for the GOP nomination for U.S. Senate against Lake last year. Most of the Democrat growth there is along the border with Maricopa County, which is a cause for immediate concern. Harris lagged Biden in the 14 other counties, and fell short of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 counts in Greenlee and Santa Cruz Counties. Three-cycle contrast map below:

· Harris dropped 60,758 ballots from Biden’s 2020 count in Maricopa County; additionally, for the first election since 1944, the county certified fewer total ballots than the preceding election (2020 in this case). This is a surefire corroboration, especially given the continued high growth of Maricopa County, of analysis and claims suggesting that the 2020 election was a third world spectacle and cheat fest of epic proportions. Harris was down 89,283 from Biden statewide.

---

Quality Checks