President-elect Donald Trump won Arizona, NBC News projects, with 11 electoral votes in 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 4-point win over Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Since then, the once GOP-controlled state has installed a Democratic governor, two Democratic senators and other statewide elected officials. A revolt against Trump among the fast-growing Latino population and some older Republicans has turned the once-red state into a battleground. Biden’s 2020 victory in Arizona marked the second time in 28 years that Arizona’s electoral votes went to a Democratic presidential candidate.
Still, many of these Democratic victories have been by the slimmest of margins. Arizona was the second closest state in the nation in the 2020 presidential race, with Biden leading Trump by just 0.3 percentage points (10,457 votes).
The state has since become the epicenter of unsubstantiated conspiracy theories that Trump stole it from him after the election, claims that state Republicans eagerly embraced — and some of those Republicans failed statewide in the 2022 midterm elections.
Still, in the 2024 presidential race, polls over the past few months have given Trump a slight lead over Harris in Arizona, though usually still within margin of error. But while Trump’s campaign was largely outspent and organized in Arizona by the Harris campaign, Republicans saw a surge in voter registration heading into a presidential election year.
And the state was right on two issues central to 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 their visits to the state. Still, Arizona was among Trump’s least-visited battlegrounds, geographically separated from most of the remaining battleground states.