The Grand Canyon State, home to conservative icon Senator Barry Goldwater, was once staunchly Republican.
It backed only one Democrat for president between 1952 and 2016 and normally sent two very conservative Republicans to the US Senate.
This changed in the Trump era. Democrats have won the last three Senate elections and narrowly captured the governor’s office in 2022.
President Biden’s narrow, 10,457-vote margin in 2020 is merely the best-known example of what’s now a clear trend.
As elsewhere across the country, college-educated white voters are the driving force behind this partisan switch.
In 2012, Arizonans with a college degree gave Mitt Romney 63% of their votes while those with graduate degrees backed Barack Obama by just a 54-42 margin.
Trump, however, won only 50% of those with only a four-year degree in 2020 and got clobbered 60-40 among graduate-degree holders.
Arizona is also home to a large and growing Latino population. It cast 15% of the state’s vote in 2016 and gave Hillary Clinton a 30-point margin over Trump.
Biden did worse, carrying Latinos by 24 points, but they cast 19% of the state’s votes.
Combined with two other nonwhite ethnic groups, Native Americans and blacks, Biden and Democrats’ newfound strength with college-educated whites is just enough to allow them to eke out narrow but consistent victories.
These trends are now reversing. Latinos seem to be trending toward the GOP here, much as national polls are showing.
Republican 2022 gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake did worse than Trump had two years earlier in much of the state but did better in Latino-heavy Santa Cruz and Yuma counties.
The exit poll also showed Lake lost Latinos by only 4 points statewide. She would easily have won had she done as well as Trump did among whites.
Republican 2022 gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake did worse than Trump had two years earlier in much of the state but did better in Latino-heavy Santa Cruz and Yuma counties.
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Voter-registration data also show a shift toward Republicans. Registered Democrats were 32.2% of all voters in November 2020.
The latest available figures, from April, reveal they now total only 29.4%. Republicans, on the other hand, have slightly increased their share of registered voters, from 35.2% to 35.4%.
The partisan balance has thus shifted 3 points in the GOP’s favor since Biden won by just 0.3%.