Media Mystified by Trump’s Strength in Arizona

President Trump at Arizona’s border wall near Yuma, Arizona.

When the New York Times’ Upshot released post-debate state polls last month, one result did not seem to fit: They found Donald Trump leading Arizona by five percent – a significant swing from the same poll’s previous result, which found Harris leading by five.

Doubtful, the pollsters decided to commission a second poll last week. To their surprise, the result was essentially the same – Donald Trump led by six percent.

As the Times’ Nate Cohn noted, these results were not dramatically out of line with other polling. While some Arizona polls show a closer race and even a slight Harris lead, most have shown a Trump lead all year, several in the mid-single-digit range.

What made them “implausible” was the way these results conflicted with the predominant media narrative about the state, one in which a mixture of demographics and a purported mass following for the late John McCain have pushed the state relentlessly left.

A lot of digital ink has been spilled over the feuding between the Arizona Republican Party, which has strongly backed Trump, and the “McCain wing,” which is anti-Trump. But most of this analysis has largely focused on how this intra-party struggle has impacted electoral results. Overlooked is how the rivalry has driven media coverage of races.

In most states, journalists cultivate sources on both sides to cross-check and compare claims. In Arizona however, this has not been possible. Due to John McCain’s larger-than-life stature among the American political press corps, virtually all of the media’s Republican contacts are linked to his old network. The result is that the media is often fed two versions of the same story. Democratic operatives brag that their operation is better than the Republican one because they are Democrats, and McCain Republicans insist the Republican operation is terrible because they are not the ones in charge of it.

That tension has created an aura of political mystery around the state which goes a long way toward explaining why Arizona has received only a fraction of the attention lavished on Pennsylvania by the media. In addition to being a presidential swing state, Arizonans will also decide a vital Senate race, two House races where Republican incumbents won by two percent in 2022, and control of the state legislature, where the GOP has single-seat majorities in both houses.

In no other state in the country do the “vibes,” the consensus among self-identified experts of where the race should be, conflict so openly with the evidence. It is difficult to imagine any other state where coverage would go with what journalists believe the state of the race should be rather than what polling indicates.

The past six years have provided just enough “evidence” to support the narrative of a relentless Democratic trend. In 2018, Kyrsten Sinema became the first Democrat to win a federal race since 1996, and the first to win a Senate election since 1988. Her victory was impressive given both her background – a bisexual former Green Party member – and that political history.

But Sinema had spent years bending over backward to create a moderate record of independence that would see her eventually hounded out of the Democratic Party entirely. She had been effectively running for Senate for six years, and when she finally did so, it was in 2018, a relatively good year for Democrats.

Despite these factors, her victory was narrow, with a margin of only 2.36 percent, following polling which showed her ahead by an average of six percent in September. Republicans won the governor’s race and both houses of the legislature.

Critically, in a year in which Democrats won the national popular vote for the U.S. House by 8.6 percent, Arizona voted around four percent more Republican than the nation for the Senate. That was a rightward trend from the 2016 Presidential race, when Arizona had voted for Donald Trump by just under four percent while Hillary Clinton won the national popular vote by two percent.

In 2020, Arizona again voted more Republican than the nation at large. The certified results showed Joe Biden defeating Donald Trump by a 4.5 percent margin nationally and winning Arizona by 0.3 percent. Democrat Mark Kelly did a bit better, winning by a margin of 2.35 percent, but it was still below the national margin for Democrats.

Until 2022, when Democrats racked up a series of narrow wins in Arizona, but those victories occurred in the context of national popular vote victories, and in 2016-2020, the state consistently voted more Republican than the nation at large. Few Republicans would argue in 2024 that if Kamala Harris were headed towards a 4-5 percent win nationally that Arizona would be safe Trump. In turn, the evidence from 2020 would indicate that if Donald Trump and Kamala Harris were in a statistical tie nationally, Trump should be expected to lead in Arizona by three percent, and perhaps a bit more if non-white men are switching to the GOP.

The elephant in the room lies with the 2022 midterm results, in particular the Senate race. Whether you buy into the media narrative of Arizona as a relentlessly blue-trending state or a Republican-leaning swing state comes down to whether you believe 2022 was a unique election held in unique circumstances in which different states and even different races within the same states did not always move in tandem, or the new normal.

Democrats have every right to feel ecstatic over their 2022 performance in Arizona. In the Senate race, Democrat Mark Kelly defeated Republican Blake Masters 51.4 percent to 46.5 percent, a margin of nearly 5 percent, in a year when Republicans won the national House vote by a bit over three percent. That would see Arizona voting substantially to the left of the country, and if you only examine the U.S. Senate race, there is a plausible case that Arizona is now a Democratic-leaning state.

But this first requires believing that Arizona moved from being four percent more Republican than the country to eight percent more Democratic in a mere two years, rather than that the 2022 Senate race was the result of typical factors, including incumbency advantage and the relative quality of the candidates. Second, it requires ignoring the wide spectrum of other races on the ballot, including that for state treasurer, where Republican Kimberly Yee won reelection by 12 percent, or even the governor’s race, where Katie Hobbs won by less than 0.2 percent. Not to mention the U.S. House races, where two districts that voted for Hobbs and Kelly also elected Republicans.

Ticket-splitting is not only what Arizona voters did in 2022. It is what they insist they will do in 2024. The New York Times/Siena poll that shows Trump leading by six percent also has Democrat Ruben Gallego leading Republican Kari Lake by seven percent. This is far from an outlier. While different polls have different presidential margins, they all show a substantial number of respondents insisting they will vote for Trump but also for the Democratic Senate candidate.

RealClearPolitics currently has Trump leading Harris by 1.1 percent in Arizona, while Gallego leads by 6.5 percent. That gap is substantially larger than Mark Kelly’s margin of victory in 2022 and suggests that even if Gallego defeats Lake by more than Kelly won by in 2022, Trump could still win the state.

There is a third reason why the media is so skeptical of ticket-splitters. Like film critic Pauline Kael, who famously expressed disbelief that Nixon could have won the 1972 election as she only knew one person who voted for him, the media and former McCain staffers are both overwhelmingly white and old, while Donald Trump has a far more broad coalition. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Arizona, where Donald Trump’s appeal among non-white and younger voters explains virtually the entire gap between the Senate and presidential races.

In the October 7-10 New York Times/Siena poll, Gallego received support from 41 percent of white voters compared to the 38 percent who supported Kamala Harris. However, while Kari Lake received the support of 29 percent of Hispanic Voters, Donald Trump is backed by 40 percent of them. Harris leads Donald Trump 50 percent to 40 percent among 18-29-year-olds and 46 percent to 45 percent among 30-44 year-olds in the polls. Gallego, however, leads Lake by landslide margins of 58 percent to 28 percent among voters aged 18-29, and 51 percent to 40 percent among those aged 30-44.

Numbers like these are repeated across polls, and in other states as well. They explain why Barack Obama is signaling alarm about Harris’s support among young black men, and why the campaign is resorting to shilling crypto at them in a desperate effort to arrest the slide.

Most importantly, many Arizonans are not Republican voters but Trump voters. The performance of a candidate like Kari Lake depends on whether she can convince Trump fans to cast ballots for her as well. Lake is struggling for the same reason almost every other Republican down-ballot candidate is running behind Trump. Far from being a liability, being on the ticket with Trump is a down-ballot Republicans’ greatest asset.

To the extent to which there is a reason to doubt Donald Trump’s leads in Arizona, it is not about his level of support, but whether young, non-white voters turn out. That would be an interesting story, one upon which the winner of not just Arizona’s electoral votes but the entire election may turn. It is a story the media seems utterly uninterested in covering, preferring to talk to those last relevant a decade ago. Arizona deserves much better coverage.

Walter Samuel is the pseudonym of a prolific international affairs writer and academic. He has worked in Washington as well as in London and Asia, and holds a Doctorate in International History.