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NBC News reported that Donald Trump, who narrowly lost the state to President Joe Biden in 2020, won the state and listed its 11 electoral votes in the column.
Trump’s expected victory over Vice President Kamala Harris comes after years of changes in the Sunbelt state’s political landscape after Trump defeated Hillary Clinton by 4 points in 2016. After what I’ve been through.
Since then, the once firmly Republican-controlled state has installed a Democratic governor, two Democratic senators and other statewide elected officials. A rapidly growing Latino population and a revolt against Trump by some traditional Republicans have turned the once-red state into a battleground. And Biden’s 2020 victory in Arizona marked the second time in the past 28 years that Arizona’s electoral votes went to a Democratic presidential candidate.
Still, many of the Democratic victories were by narrow margins. Arizona was the second closest state in the nation in the 2020 presidential election, with Biden defeating Trump by just 0.3 points (10,457 votes).
The state has since become an epicenter for President Trump’s post-election spread of unsubstantiated conspiracy theories that the election was stolen, a claim the state’s Republicans have enthusiastically embraced, and some Republicans have expressed concern about the 2022 midterm elections. He was defeated statewide.
But in the 2024 presidential election, polls over the past few months have shown Mr. Trump with a slight advantage over Ms. Harris in Arizona, but typically still within the margin of error. But in Arizona, where Trump’s campaign largely outspent and organized Harris’ campaign, Republicans saw a surge in voter registration heading into a presidential election year.
The area around President-elect Trump’s Mar-a-Lago mansion in Florida remains on high alert even after his election victory.
And the state was a perfect fit for two issues central to the Trump campaign: the economy and immigration.
Harris and Trump visited the Arizona-Mexico border during their visit to the state, which experienced some of the highest gas prices in the nation this summer. Still, Arizona is geographically distant from most other battleground states and was one of the battlegrounds Trump least visited.
This article first appeared on NBCNews.com. Read more from NBC News here:
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