Of the seven swing states, the one that shifted the most between 2024 and 2020 was Arizona. After Biden won the Copper State by 0.3 points four years ago, Trump carried it comfortably by 5.5 points this year. Examining the dynamics at play in Arizona provides insight into why Kamala Harris performed so poorly compared to expectations nationwide, as well as where Trump’s greatest strengths were with voters.
As a border state, the border crisis was a particularly important issue in Arizona. In December 2023, the high-water mark for border encounters under the Biden-Harris administration, approximately one-third of illegal crossings occurred in Arizona. 58 percent of Arizona voters say that the government does not currently have control over the border.
As President Joe Biden’s “border czar,” Vice President Kamala Harris was always going to be vulnerable on the issue with voters in Arizona and throughout the country. But it’s not just that Harris did a poor job on the border – she openly lied to the public about her record and downplayed the severity of the crisis.
Harris’s speech in Douglas, Arizona, in late September that was meant to shore up faltering public approval of her leadership on the border crisis was a case in point of this failed strategy.
During those remarks, Harris bragged about “raising pay” for border patrol agents, breaking up drug and human trafficking rings, and demanding that China crack down on companies producing fentanyl precursors to be shipped to Mexico. Each of these claims was intended to depict Harris as a tough-on-crime defender of border security but contradicted Harris’s actual record as a sanctuary city-supporting, weak-on-crime open borders extremist.
It’s true that the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act raised overtime pay for border agents. But this came after Harris jumped on the discredited media hoax about border agents “whipping” migrants, vilifying them and even comparing the agents in the photos to slave owners. Trump received a unanimous endorsement from the Border Patrol Union for a reason – both Harris and Biden treated border agents as obstacles to their open borders agenda, rather than as partners in securing the country against drugs, crime, and illegal aliens.
It is also technically true that “Operation Middle Man,” which Harris oversaw as Attorney General of California, did lead to the arrests of 12 individuals, including one linked to the notorious “Norteño” gang. But it is telling that Harris had to reach back a dozen years, to 2012, to pull out one example of her being involved in a gang arrest. Moreover, Harris’s one instance of doing her job and taking violent criminals off the streets is immediately undercut by the multiple instances in which she allowed criminal illegal aliens to walk free and continue victimizing other Americans.
Finally, it is true that the Biden-Harris administration has asked China to stop the production of chemicals to make fentanyl – a request that has not been backed up by any sort of leverage to force Beijing to comply. Instead, Biden and Harris have offered tangible concessions to Beijing in exchange for empty promises.
For Arizonans listening in, Harris’s remarks must have come across as contemptuous and insulting. After millions of illegal border crossings wreaked chaos throughout Arizona and the rest of the country, the vice president showed up to brag about how tough she was on crime and pretend like she had always been a great champion of border security.
Harris’s tone-deaf approach to the border and Trump’s concrete plans to fix what Biden and Harris had broken created a surge for the Republican nominee that forged an entirely new political coalition. Trump increased his vote share with Arizona’s Black and large Hispanic populations, both of which disproportionately faced competition for jobs and housing from the influx of illegal migrants.
Several other influences contributed to Trump’s victory as well. Arizona’s large Catholic population was undoubtedly alienated by Harris’s record of anti-Catholic bigotry, notably highlighted in one long-form two-minute ad that ran in the state. Phoenix, home to two-thirds of the state’s population, also ranked number one in the nation for inflation, meaning that voters there were particularly incentivized to punish Harris for the price increases under her watch.
Old-fashioned grassroots political work also played a role in flipping Arizona from blue to red. Republican voter registrations outpaced Democrat registrations by nearly six points with just a few days to go until Election Day, doubling the GOP’s advantage from 2020. Democrat voter registration in Phoenix’s Maricopa County also declined from 814,000 in 2020 to 692,000 in 2024, a significant 15 percent drop.
Ultimately, all of these factors combined to hand Trump his biggest swing-state victory on November 5. By studying what Trump and Republicans did in Arizona, the GOP can pave the way for similarly impressive victories in the years ahead.
Neil Banerji is a proud Las Vegas resident and former student at the University of Oxford. In his spare time, he enjoys reading Winston Churchill and Edmund Burke.
