2020 United States presidential election in Arizona

On September 9, 2019, the Arizona Republican Party became one of several state Republican parties to officially cancel their respective primaries and caucuses.[14] Donald Trump's re-election campaign and GOP officials have cited the fact that Republicans canceled several state primaries when George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush sought a second term in 1992 and 2004, respectively; and Democrats scrapped some of their primaries when Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were seeking reelection in 1996 and 2012, respectively.[15][16][17]

Of the 57 total delegates, 3 were allocated to each of the state's 9 congressional districts, 10 to at-large delegates, and another 3 to pledged party leaders and elected officials (PLEO delegates). 17 bonus delegates were also allocated.

The state party still formally conducted the higher meetings in their walking subcaucus-type delegate selection system. The legislative district and county conventions were held from February 8 to April 11 to select delegates to the Arizona State Republican Convention. At the Arizona State Republican Convention, which took place on May 9, the state party formally binded all 57 of its national pledged delegates to Trump. A May 15 email from the Arizona GOP stated that "every one of our ... delegates ... elected pledged to support Donald Trump and Mike Pence as the Republican Party's 2020 nominees for President and Vice President!"[15]

The 54 pledged delegates Arizona sent to the national convention were joined by 3 pledged PLEO delegates, consisting of the National Committeeman, National Committeewoman, and chairman of the Arizona Republican Party.

The Arizona Democratic primary took place on March 17, 2020, on the same date as the Democratic primaries in Florida and Illinois. Former Vice President Joe Biden won the primary with 43.70% of the vote and 38 delegates, running ahead of Senator Bernie Sanders from Vermont, who received 32.68% of the vote and 29 delegates. No other candidates received any delegates and the only other candidates to receive more than 1% of the vote were Senator Elizabeth Warren from Massachusetts, with 5.79%, and former South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg, with 4.05%. Both Warren and Buttigieg withdrew prior to the contest. The other candidates on the ballot comprised a collective 1.23% of the vote.[18]

Biden won 13 of 15 counties in the state of Arizona, with Sanders winning Coconino (home to Flagstaff) and Yuma (home to its eponymous city) counties.

The official vote totals reported by the Arizona Secretary of State added up to 86.72%, as the remaining 13.28% of the vote was composed of candidates whose individual vote totals were not reported.[18]

Popular vote share by county

Map legend

•   Biden—40–50%
•   Biden—50–60%
•   Sanders—30–40%
•   Sanders—40–50%

†Candidate withdrew after early voting started.

February 19, 2020: (from left) Speaker of the Arizona House Russell Bowers, Governor Doug Ducey, Congresswoman Debbie Lesko, and President Trump at a rally at Arizona Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix.

Arizona was a heavily contested state throughout the election. Once a reliably Republican state, it has trended more Democratic in recent years, with Trump winning it by just 3.5% in 2016. Compared to past Republicans, Trump's performance was historically weak: Mitt Romney won it with a 9.03% margin in 2012 over Barack Obama,[22] John McCain by 8.48% in 2008 also against Obama,[23] and George W. Bush by 10.45% in 2004 against John Kerry.[24] Arizona was one of just ten states to swing more Democratic in 2016, and its 5.5 percentage point swing was the fourth largest in the country.[25] The swing mirrored a nationwide pattern where suburban voters, formerly the principle Republican voting base, swung deep into the Democratic column. Arizona's leftward swing was also credited to a rapidly growing Hispanic population.

The Democratic advantage in the state was pronounced further in the 2018 elections. Democrat Kyrsten Sinema won the open Senate seat against Trump loyalist[26] and Representative Martha McSally by a margin of 55,900 votes (2.4%),[27] flipping the state blue for the first time since 1988. Sinema carried Maricopa County, which holds the majority of Arizona citizens, by 60,256 votes.[28] McSally would later be appointed to Arizona's other Senate seat on January 3, 2019 after the death of John McCain. Democrats also won a 5–4 majority in Arizona's House of Representatives delegation.

Both candidates spent massive amounts of money on advertising, though Biden outspent Trump 2–1.[29]

Trump visited Arizona significantly more than his opponent, holding 4 rallies in just one week, compared to Biden, who only visited the state once.[30][31] Biden favored small, masked gathering to limit the spread of COVID-19, which ravaged the state's large Navajo communities,[32] whereas Trump favored large rallies with thousands of people in attendance, oftentimes without masks and contrary to the advice of health officials.[33]

October 25, 2020: Campaign rally for Joe Biden at Corona Ranch and Rodeo Grounds in Phoenix, featuring Cher.

At his rallies, Trump campaigned with the Republican Governor of Arizona, Doug Ducey, as well as Republican Senator Martha McSally, in a bid to help her win reelection against Democrat Mark Kelly in the 2020 United States Senate special election. Ducey suffered from low approval ratings due to his handling of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic – his approval fell from 50% to 29% before the pandemic[34] to a 35–42 deficit in an October 2, 2020 poll.[35] Ducey was booed at a Trump rally in Tucson, with Trump supporters shouting "open up and open our state".[36]

Graphical summary

Aggregate polls

2020 polls

2019 polls

According to the Federal Election Commission, in 2019 and 2020, Joe Biden and his interest groups raised $9,284,978.20,[51] Donald Trump and his interest groups raised $15,506,263.10,[52] and Jo Jorgensen raised $29,078.65[53] from Arizona-based contributors.

• Joe Biden / Kamala Harris, Democratic
• Donald Trump / Mike Pence, Republican
• Jo Jorgensen / Jeremy "Spike" Cohen, Libertarian

Independent candidates who wished to run were required to submit a nomination petition and financial disclosure form between 120 and 90 days before the primary election. A valid nomination petition required signatures from 3% of unaffiliated registered voters in Arizona as of March 1, 2020. However, the signatories may be of any political party or unaffiliated as long as they have not already signed a petition for a candidate registered in a political party who intends to run in the same election. Petitions may be physical or electronic; in 2012, Arizona introduced E-Qual, an online nominating petition platform.[54]

In-addition, write-in candidates were required to file a nomination paper (including the candidate's name and signature; residence and post office address; age and date of birth; and the length of time the candidate has lived in Arizona) and financial disclosure form by 5:00 p.m. on the 40th day before the election in which the candidate is running – in this case, September 24 – for their votes to be counted. Sore-loser laws prevent candidates who lost a primary election from running in the general election as a write-in candidate. Write-in candidates also may not run if they didn't receive enough signatures to attain ballot access while filing for the primary election or if the candidate did not receive enough signatures to gain ballot access in the general election.[54] The following candidates were given write-in access:[55]

• Howie Hawkins / Angela Nicole Walker, Green
• Jade Simmons / Claudeliah Roze, Independent
• Gloria La Riva / Sunil Freeman, Socialism and Liberation
• Daniel Clyde Cummings / Ryan Huber, Constitution
• President R. Boddie / Eric Stoneham, Independent

Technically the voters of Arizona cast their ballots for electors, or representatives to the Electoral College, rather than directly for President and Vice President. Arizona is allocated 11 electors because it has 9 congressional districts and 2 senators. All candidates who appear on the ballot or qualify to receive write-in votes must submit a list of 11 electors who pledge to vote for their candidate and their running mate. Whoever wins the most votes in the state is awarded all 11 electoral votes. Their chosen electors then vote for president and vice president. Although electors are pledge to their candidate and running mate, they are not obligated to vote for them. An elector who votes for someone other than their candidate is known as a faithless elector. In the state of Arizona, a faithless elector's vote is voided and replaced, but the faithless elector is not penalized.[56][57]

The electors of each state and the District of Columbia met on December 15, 2020, to cast their votes for president and vice president. All 11 pledged electors cast their votes for President-elect former Vice President Joe Biden and Senator Kamala Harris from California. The Electoral College itself never meets as one body. Instead, the electors from each state and the District of Columbia met in their respective capitols. The electoral vote was tabulated and certified by Congress in a joint session on January 6, 2021 per the Electoral Count Act.

These electors were nominated by each party in order to vote in the Electoral College should their candidate win the state:[58]

Note: The percentages in this table are not the same as the totals above. This is because the table below includes write-in votes with the candidates unreported by the Arizona Secretary of State.

• Maricopa (largest city: Phoenix)

Biden won 5 out of 9 congressional districts in Arizona.[61] The presidential results matched the congressional results, where Democrats held an identical 5–4 majority. Biden flipped the 1st district, which includes Casa Grande, Flagstaff, and Navajo Nation and voted for Donald Trump in 2016 by a 47.7%–46.6% margin against Hillary Clinton. Trump easily won the 4th district, which takes in Prescott and most of the rural, northwestern portion of the state. He also carried the 5th, 6th, and 8th districts, all suburban, college-educated districts where Republican dominance has been slipping in recent years. Notably, the 6th district, despite being represented by a Republican in Congress for all but two years in its history, was won by Trump with a mere 4.1% margin of victory.[28]

Along with the 1st district, Biden carried the 7th and 9th districts, both of which encompass liberal bastions of inner Phoenix and parts of the cities of Glendale and Tempe, respectively. The 2nd and 3rd districts, both border districts dominated by Tucson and large Hispanic populations,[62][63] also voted for Biden.

Results below are percentages from Daily Kos, which does not list exact vote totals per district. Incomplete vote totals are available from the 1st,[64] 2nd,[65] 3rd,[66] and 4th[67] districts at Dave Leip's Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections.

Fox News called Arizona for Biden at 11:20 p.m. EST on November 3, election day, with 73% of projected vote counted.[68] The Associated Press did so at 2:51 a.m. EST on November 4.[69][70] Fox News received push-back from the Trump campaign and no other network called Arizona on election night.[71][72][73][74] Fox News decision desk director Arnon Mishkin defended the Arizona call at 12:30 a.m., saying that Fox News was "four standard deviations from being wrong"[71] and that Trump was "not going to be able to take over and win enough votes to eliminate that seven-point lead that [Biden] has."[75] Biden and other Democratic candidates began election night with a wide lead in the state, and at the time Fox News called Arizona for Biden, he led by 210,259 votes (53.9% to 44.9%).[76] The reporting in Arizona was the reverse of a 'red mirage' and 'blue shift' effect seen nationwide, where the counting of election day votes before early and absentee votes gave Republicans across the country an early lead. Votes cast on election day typically leaned heavily Republican while those cast early and absentee ballots leaned heavily Democratic, partially due to the skepticism of mail in voting mostly from Trump and fellow Republicans.[77] However, Arizona and several other Sun Belt states had the opposite effect. Early votes and absentee votes cast before the election were pre-counted and released shortly after 10:00 p.m. EST, when polls closed. Election day votes, as well as a few absentee votes, were released on election night and trickled in throughout the rest of the week. FiveThirtyEight correctly predicted that close races "might have to wait for those last few ballots before knowing who won."[78] Despite Biden's lead dropping throughout the week, it became clear that Trump's margin among election day votes would not be enough to overtake Biden's lead: Trump needed 59% of the outstanding vote to win,[79][80] but continuously won around only 53% of the votes released in several ballot dumps after election day.[81]

On November 11, Decision Desk HQ, along with several other outlets, projected that Biden would carry the state.[82] On November 12, ABC News, NBC News, CNN and The New York Times all projected Biden to carry the state shortly after 11:00 p.m. Eastern.[83][84][85]

On January 6, as a joint session of Congress began to certify the election for President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, there was an objection to Arizona's 11 electoral votes, brought forward by Representative Paul Gosar of Arizona's 4th congressional district and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, and signed by 67 other Senators and Representatives.[86] Debates began over the objection in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, but were abruptly cut short after threats by pro-Trump demonstrators in that escalated into a full blown storming of the Capitol, forcing the building to be locked down and Congress to be evacuated. After the Capitol was secured at 5:40 p.m.[87] and Congress reconvened, the objection failed 6-93 in the Senate, and 121-303 in the House.[88] The riot reportedly dissuaded several Republican Senators and Representatives from objecting to the Electoral College results.[89]

The Trump campaign, the Republican National Committee and the Arizona Republican Party filed a lawsuit that alleges that "overvotes" were "incorrectly rejected". A representative for Maricopa County stated that only "180 potential overvotes" are at stake in the case.[90] The Trump campaign requested that their evidence be kept secret from the public, but the judge refused to allow the secrecy.[91] The Trump campaign also stated that they had video footage from within a polling area; however, such footage would be illegal if taken within 75 feet of a polling area with voters present. On November 10, 2020, Associate Presiding Civil Judge Daniel Kiley accepted a request from Snell & Wilmer, the law firm which was representing the Trump campaign and its allies, to withdraw from the Arizona lawsuit.[92][93] On November 11, 2020, Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich rejected Trump's voter fraud claim during an interview with Fox Business and stated that Biden would win the state of Arizona.[94][95] On November 13, the Trump campaign dropped their lawsuit, after it became evident that the number of votes potentially to be contested would not overcome Biden's margin of victory in the state.[96]

Exit polls from the Associated Press[7] indicated that Biden carried college-educated white voters 50–48, which make up 28% of Arizona's electorate. He also carried college-educated voters overall by 53–48 and lost suburban voters by only 51–48. Suburban backlash against Trump and the Republican Party was indicated as far back as 2016, when Arizona shifted 5.5 percentage points to the left even as 40 other states shifted to the right.[25] Among other states that shifted to the left were California, Georgia, Kansas, Texas, and Virginia, all of which states where the primary Republican voting base used to be in the vast suburbs and exurbs outside of major cities.[102] Past Republicans had done very well in the white, heavily educated Phoenix suburbs: Mitt Romney won college-educated voters in Arizona 58–40 in 2012, John McCain by 55–43 in 2008, and George W. Bush by 54–46 in 2004. They also carried suburban voters by twenty points.[9] Perhaps the greatest sign of the suburban revolt was in Arizona's 6th congressional district – the most educated district in Arizona,[28] it has been represented by Republicans for all but two years of its existence, and Bush, Romney, and McCain all won upwards of 60% of the vote in their respective elections.[103][61] This time around, Trump won it by a mere four points.

Joe Biden campaigned on his longtime friendship with the late Senator John McCain from Arizona.

Romney, McCain, and Bush were all seen as much more moderate than the Trump wing of the party – several of their former staffers outright endorsed Biden, stating "Given the incumbent president’s lack of competent leadership, his efforts to aggravate rather than bridge divisions among Americans, and his failure to uphold American values, we believe the election of former Vice President Biden is clearly in the national interest."[104] Trump frequently disparaged moderate Republicans, reinvigorating the term RINO ("Republican in name only") to refer to members of the Republican Party who refused to support Trump's efforts to challenge the election results or even Trump's campaign at all.[105] Several of their former presidential staffers endorsed Biden leading up to election day.[104] Trump and his family had criticized the moderate wing of the party on several occasions,[106] which was seen as divide that could prove mortal for the Republican Party in Arizona.[107] On February 29, 2020, Trump called Romney a "low life" after he voted to convict Trump on abuse of power in 2020,[108] which made Romney the only Senator in history to vote to convict a president of his own party. Perhaps the most fatal blow to the Trump campaign was his unabashed criticism of the late Senator McCain, who represented Arizona from 1987 to 2018. Several sources told The Atlantic that Trump told his aides that McCain was "a fucking loser" in response to McCain receiving half-staff flag honors following his death of brain cancer in 2018.[109] He previously disparaged McCain on other occasions, stating "I don't like losers" in reference to him losing the 2008 election, "I like people that weren't captured" in reference to his being a prisoner of war in the Vietnam War,[110] and criticizing him on his deciding vote against the American Health Care Act of 2017, a "skinny repeal" of Obamacare.[111] These incidents culminated in Cindy McCain, John McCain's widow, endorsing Biden on September 22, 2020, tweeting that "There's only one candidate in this race who stands up for our values" in reference to the vice president.[112] Democratic advertising often referenced Biden's longtime friendship with McCain[11][113] in order to appeal to moderate voters.[114]

Most analysts referenced Trump's attack on the moderate wing of the Republican Party (especially McCain) as an extreme disadvantage in the state of Arizona which had already been growing more unfavorable for Republicans.[13][115][116] An article from Politico argued that the Trump campaign "did more damage to the Republican Party in Arizona than almost anywhere else."[117]

Pushing Biden over the edge was the Latino vote, who made up 19% of the electorate, higher than in previous years. Though Democrats have historically won ethnic and racial minorities by large margins,[118] the Arizona Republican Party has had an especially strained relationship with the Latino community going back to 2010 in the wake of the controversial Arizona SB 1070 law, which was seen as, by some, unfairly targeting the Latino community.[7] Historically, Democrats' biggest margins have been in heavily minority counties including two on the southern border, Pima, the second most populous county and home to Tucson, as well as Santa Cruz. A 2020 survey from the Pew Research Center[119] found that the most important issue among Hispanic voters was to "establish [a] way for most immigrants in the U.S. illegally to stay legally," with 54% responding that it was very important and 29% that it was somewhat important. 42% also responded that "improv[ing] security of country's borders" was also a very important issue, and 34% that it was somewhat important. During the campaign, Biden campaigned on ending construction of Trump's Mexican border wall, dramatically increase the refugee cap from Trump's historically low 15,000 cap, and rolling out an easier pathway to citizenship for undocumented and prospective immigrants,[120] including a proposed bill introduced after his inauguration that would unveil up a pathway to citizenship for all 11 million estimated undocumented immigrants.[121] Meanwhile, Trump enacted several immigration restrictions on asylum seekers, refugees, and prospective legal and illegal immigrants, and some pundits credited Trump's victory in 2016 to immigration fearmongering.[122]

Tom O'Halleran (second from right), a Democrat representative from AZ-01, meets with the Navajo Nation Housing Authority. Navajo voters pushed Biden over the edge in the state of Arizona as well as O'Halleran in the concurrent House of Representatives elections.

While Biden did carry the Hispanic/Latino vote by a large 59-40 margin,[7] this was eleven points weaker than Hillary Clinton's 61-31 win in 2016 among Latinos, in spite of her loss statewide.[123] Santa Cruz County, where 83.46% of the population is Hispanic or Latino,[124] swung 12 points more Republican than in 2016, while Yuma County (63.76% Hispanic or Latino)[125] swung 5.1 points more Republican.[126] Nonetheless, these swings were cancelled out by a massive increase in turnout and a significant increase in the number of Hispanic voters.[127][128]

An increase in indigenous voting was also considered vital to Biden's victory – turnout in the northeast of the state surged compared to 2016.[129] Biden easily won Apache County, dominated by the Navajo and Fort Apache reservations; and Coconino County, encompassing the Havasupai Nation and parts of the Navajo, Hopi, and Hualapai nations. Anywhere from 60 to 90% of the Navajo Nation's 67,000 registered voters voted for Biden.[130] In Pima County, Biden won the precincts encompassing the Tohono O'odham, San Xavier, and Pascua Yaqui reservations, often with over 90% of the vote.[131] The Navajo is the largest Native American reservation in the country .[132]

Kelli Ward (left), future Chair of the Arizona GOP, would ultimately vote to censure Doug Ducey (second from left) for his refusal to overturn the Arizona election results, a divide that some saw as only exacerbating the Democratic trend in Arizona.