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    • Here’s why Trump won AZ despite Harris’ ground game
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    Here’s why Trump won AZ despite Harris’ ground game

    Harry Posted on

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    The weekend before the presidential election, Kamala Harris’ campaign had big news to share.

    Arizona Democrats had just completed their biggest organizing day ever, knocking on 112,000 doors and making 683,651 phone calls in a single Saturday to boost the vice president’s presidential bid.

    But just seven days later, Arizona handed Harris her final defeat on the battleground map when the race was finally called for President-elect Donald Trump on Saturday night.

    Trump dominated the polls, sweeping all seven battleground states and winning the national popular vote. It roared back in Arizona, ending Democrats’ statewide winning streak and testing the limits of how effective the traditional campaign ground game really is in a presidential contest.

    “Frankly, we weren’t anywhere near the district we needed for this to matter,” said DJ Quinlan, former executive director of the Arizona Democratic Party.

    Trump is on track to win Arizona by about 185,000 votes, according to incomplete election results released Thursday. That’s a margin nearly 17 times larger than the 10,457 votes President Joe Biden won four years ago, when the COVID-19 pandemic moved much of the Democratic campaign effort online.

    In other words, Trump has made a stunning comeback from his narrow defeat in 2020 and all the election denialism that followed. The magnitude of his win came as a shock to Arizona political observers on both sides of the aisle.

    “I saw no advance warning anywhere in the bubble I lived in. I haven’t seen anything to suggest that Kamala is going to do anything other than win and win big,” said Sam Campana, the former GOP mayor of Scottsdale and spokesman for the Republican coalition on behalf of Harris.

    Arizona is a battleground state with an independent streak, where the winning campaigns are often the ones that move to the center in the general election. Democrats have steadily increased their ranks under Trump, claiming the governorship, attorney general and, since 2018, two Senate seats.

    The Harris campaign relied on data collected by Democrats in successful races in 2018, 2020 and 2022 to target voters they thought would vote for Harris. Harris’ running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, pointed to Arizona’s recent record of razor-thin margins at his recent rally here.

    “In Arizona, we know it takes one or two votes per precinct to win the entire race for the country,” Walz said in Tucson, urging his supporters to knock on doors and make phone calls to get the final votes out.

    A few days later, Trump won by a much wider margin than one or two votes per district. And nationally, Arizona’s outcome didn’t matter much. The former and soon-to-be president had already announced the arrival of the White House chief of staff before a race was called in Arizona.

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    Is fielding important?

    Democrats were confident that their in-house ground game operation could outpace Republican efforts and give Harris a percentage point gain on election night; It was a small advantage that could be very important if the race was indeed as close as forecasters expected.

    “The field game is not the deciding factor. It just meant more people participated,” Quinlan said. “It’s still moving the needle, but there’s definitely a limit to how far it can reach.”

    Harris’ campaign opened more offices and hired more staff in Arizona than the Trump campaign, which is running in conjunction with the Republican National Committee. As of November, Harris had 19 outposts in the state and more than 200 full-time employees. Nearly 130,000 people have signed up to volunteer, according to the campaign.

    The Harris campaign did not comment for this story.

    Trump, meanwhile, had 10 offices and had largely left his ground game to outside groups, which remained tight-lipped about the scope of their operations until Election Day.

    The Harris campaign said it knocked on 100,000 doors in Arizona during the third weekend of October, another 130,000 on the last weekend of the month, and 200,000 doors during its final rush to vote on the first weekend in November.

    Still, Trump won by a significant margin. Voters’ frustrations with the economy and changes in how people get their news are too great for any field operation to handle, Harris supporters said as they analyzed their losses this week.

    “I don’t think this will come at the expense of still having conversations with people at the door, but there is an issue with scalability, especially in an age where everyone has a Ring camera on their front door. “It’s harder to meet voters face to face these days,” Quinlan said.

    Trump and Harris personally came to Arizona in roughly equal numbers, but the Republican candidate’s campaign held fewer events and outsourced much of its groundwork to outside groups such as Turning Point Action and America PAC, the political committee funded by tech billionaire Elon Musk.

    Leaving the ground game to others allowed the Trump campaign to put the extra money toward other expenses, such as TV ads; these expenditures were less costly when purchased directly by campaigns than by outside groups.

    Republicans got votes back with postal advantage

    Despite what the polls said, not every Arizonan thought the presidential race would be over.

    “I personally don’t believe it will be that close,” Arizona Republican Party Chair Gina Swoboda told The Arizona Republic in September. “I think the American people have been really fed up over the last four years.”

    Swoboda was a key player in the Republican effort to rebuild their early voting advantage; That came to nothing in 2020 when Trump dissuaded his supporters from casting their ballots by mail. The party’s pleas have worked even with some of the biggest skeptics of mail-in voting.

    It was the same for Irma and Richard Lee, retirees who live in Sun City and voted early for Trump. Those waiting in line for the J.D. Vance rally in October said they had little faith that votes would be counted properly after 2020 but were willing to comply with the campaign’s request.

    “The campaign is telling people to vote early,” said Richard Lee. “I think eventually there will be shenanigans again. “They want to make sure they get people out there and at least vote in advance.”

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    Trump’s newfound method of voting by mail has also paved the way for outside groups to support his ground game in the weeks before the election to “chase ballots” or get people to vote early.

    Tyler Bowyer, Turning Point Action’s chief operating officer, said in an interview this week that his organization’s mission aims to target the 400,000 low-propensity Arizona voters who typically don’t participate in elections.

    Educating people on how to vote by mail is often the difference between someone voting or not participating in the election entirely, he said.

    “We are not targeting the whole world. We’re targeting this very specific population of low-propensity voters, less likely voters, to make sure no one makes a mistake and forgets to vote,” Bowyer said. “And if you do that here at a high rate, at a high clip, you significantly peak in attendance, and that’s where we stayed the whole time.”

    Bowyer “obsessively” tracked early voter turnout on whiteboards in his office and used that data to determine where to send “strike teams” in areas where turnout appeared to be lagging. Turning Point also targeted the state’s 350,000 midrange-leaning voters.

    Democratic coalition dissolves in 2024

    For all the talk of the campaign ground game, Arizona’s election results weren’t much different from the rest of the country. Nearly every state in the country moved to the right compared to 2020; even the blue states that Harris ultimately won and where there was no ground game operation in either campaign.

    Analysis of Arizona election results showed Trump gaining ground among white voters without a college education, Latino voters and young people. Trump also improved in all four of Arizona’s border counties.

    Some of the areas that shifted left in Maricopa County, America’s largest battleground county, were retirement areas like Sun City, where voters tend to be older and whiter.

    One particularly sore point for Democrats was the Loop 101 corridor, which was instrumental in Biden’s narrow victory four years ago.

    The campaign targeted voters in East Valley cities like Scottsdale, Mesa, Chandler and Gilbert, hoping independents and Republicans there would be receptive to Harris’ bipartisan, anti-Trump message.

    Harris made a personal visit to Scottsdale, promising to put a Republican in her cabinet and saying: a behind the scenes story about her relationship with the late Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.

    The region still tilted toward Trump Analysis of election results at district level by the Republic.

    “We weren’t asking Republicans to re-register as Democrats. “We didn’t ask them to abandon their party,” said Campana, the Republican former mayor who supports Harris. “What we were trying to do was say that Trump is an aberration and does not represent Republican ideals… and just this once, vote Democrat, vote the other party, give Republicans four years to rebuild their party, denounce Trump and say that this is not who we are.” to say, and then to come back and understand who we really are. But that won’t happen.”

    Campana was so hopeful about Election Day that he invited 17 members of his family to dinner and displayed Harris campaign posters. People Campana knew were signing up on Facebook to join Republicans’ Harris efforts and sharing it with friends and family.

    Campana was expecting a close national contest where the results could take days to count, as polls and pundits predicted, but the writing was on the wall before his family went home to watch the 10 o’clock news. He has avoided election analysis ever since.

    “I get a lot of emails saying this is where we are going next and don’t despair. But I don’t even open them,” Campana said. “I’m hopeless.”

    Harry
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