President-elect Donald Trump has won Arizona, completing a sweep of all seven battleground in the 2024 election.
The Associated Press called the race at 9:21 p.m. ET on Nov. 9. With this win, Trump’s total electoral college count moves to 312 to Vice President Kamala Harris’s 226.
Trump was projected to win the election on the morning of Nov. 6. Harris conceded the race later the same day.
Trump’s Arizona victory follows candidate Joe Biden’s upset win in the state in 2020, a 0.3-percent squeaker that marked the first time since Bill Clinton’s 1996 win that The Grand Canyon State had voted for a Democratic presidential candidate. In 2016, Trump won Arizona by 3.5 percentage points.
Maricopa County, where 62 percent of the state’s 7.4 million residents, and more than half its 4.367 million voters, live, proved pivotal. Trump won the Phoenix-area vote CC to CC percent, according to the Maricopa County Elections Department.
Trump fared better in the key county than in 2016 when he won it with less than 48 percent and in 2020 when he lost it with 47.65 percent, becoming the first GOP presidential candidate to lose Maricopa County in 72 years.
As in Nevada, winning the Latino vote drives Arizona campaigns, especially in Maricopa County where one-third of voters are Hispanic, compared to less than 19 percent nationally.
While many media declared Trump the winner of Arizona’s 11 Electoral College votes in the preceding days, the AP withheld doing so until all mail-in ballots had been counted. Reported results had not changed much for more than a day by late-afternoon Nov. 8.
On Nov. 7, the Arizona Secretary of State’s office added tens of thousands of votes to the tally, but said there were hundreds of thousands of ballots left to count, including nearly 500,000 in Maricopa County. Therefore, the presidential race and the U.S. Senate contest between Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) and Kari Lake remained too close to call by late afternoon Nov. 8.
At 5 p.m. EST—2 p.m. PST—on Nov. 8, those numbers, largely frozen for more than a day, had Trump with 1.4 million votes, 52.5 percent of the total tally, to Harris’s 1.2 million votes, or 46.5 percent.
Despite the president-elect’s 161,000 vote lead, a significant 6 percentage point advantage, since most Arizona voters cast ballots by mail, and counting typically takes days. the AP withheld the call until it was mathematically impossible for Harris to overcome Trump’s lead.
