The States That Flipped From Trump in 2020 — And How They Could Shape Up in 2024 #1: Arizona
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Part 6: Finale
Six states that Donald Trump won the electoral votes for in the 2016 presidential election flipped (or in the case of Nebraska, partially shifted) to Joe Biden in the 2020 election. One of Nebraska’s five Electoral College votes went to Biden. The five states that went from red to blue for president are Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
In this series of posts, I will look at recent political history of these states and current partisan trends. With a rematch between Biden and Trump in 2024 looking increasingly likely, this series of posts will largely assume that that will be the case and make some sense of whether these states will stick with Biden or flip back to Trump. (Even if Nikki Haley becomes the Republican nominee, however, the information in this series will still be relevant.)
Today is the first post of the series and centers on Arizona, The Grand Canyon State.
Arizona and Recent Presidential Elections
Until the 2020 election, Arizona had gone red for president every time in the 21st century. Not since Bill Clinton’s reelection victory in 1996 had a Democratic presidential candidate won the state. But after much legal wrangling, Joe Biden took Arizona’s 11 electoral votes by a razor-thin margin:
- Votes for Joe Biden (D): 1,672,143 (49.36% of the total votes)
- Votes for Donald Trump (R): 1,661,686 (49.06% of the total votes)
For many political observers, Arizona going blue was fairly shocking not just because Republican presidential candidates had won the state five straight times. None of those margins were particularly close, either. Even though the 2008 Republican candidate, John McCain, was a U.S. Senator from Arizona, the GOP still won the state comfortably in the 2000, 2004, 2012, and 2016 elections. That changed in 2020.
An interesting data point to note is that 2020 saw a surge in the number of participating voters — over 800,000 more of them, in fact. Conventional wisdom is that Democrats tend to benefit more from higher turnout elections, though there isn’t a consensus that that is the case.
Either way, there are particular noteworthy increases in margin of victory when you look at how the counties voted in 2016 and 2020.¹ Below is the vote share for Biden and Trump in 2020 and Clinton and Trump in 2016. Here are a couple things to note about the following table:
- For both years, I calculated the margin of victory, with positive percentages meaning that the Democratic candidate won and negative percentages meaning that Trump won it. (Positive and negative do not indicate any value judgment. They are just there to show the direction of how each county voted.)
- The final column indicates how much the margin of victory shifted from 2016 to 2020 toward either Biden or Trump. A positive number means the margin of victory shifted toward Biden (i.e., Biden performed better than Hillary Clinton relative to Trump), while a negative number means the margin of victory shifted toward Trump. So, even if Biden loses a county, he could still perform better against Trump than Clinton did if this last column shows a positive number.
The most noteworthy observation comes from viewing the numbers for the four most populous counties in Arizona. In order, those are Maricopa, Pima, Pinal, and Yavapai. The margin of victory increase for Democrats from 2016 to 2020 was as follows:
- Maricopa: 5.0%
- Pima: 5.0%
- Pinal: 2.0%
- Yavapai: 2.0%
Even though Trump won Pinal and Yavapai Counties, Biden made them closer contests in the 2020 election. Biden also took Maricopa County — which Trump won in 2016 — by far the most populated county in the state. The improved performance for Democrats in those four counties, especially Maricopa, propelled their party to their claim of the 11 electoral votes of Arizona.
Even in counties where Trump performed better in 2020 than in 2016, they are much less populated that those four counties. That means they weren’t enough to overcome the deficit. But with a mere 10,457 vote difference between Biden and Trump, even those less-populated counties were almost enough for Trump to win the state instead. Still, if Trump wants to take back Arizona — which he will almost definitely need to win the presidency in 2024 — his campaign will want to focus on improving in Maricopa, Pima, Pinal, and Yavapai Counties.
Could Other Elections in Arizona Suggest How 2024 Will Pan Out?
Of course, elections for president don’t happen in a vacuum. They happen alongside plenty of other contests: Congress, state executives, state legislators, mayors, and more. The presidency will always be the premier race, but these other elections can make a difference in how a state votes for president and vice versa. These races can potentially give some insight into what will happen this year, but such comparisons should be made cautiously.
- Each race for an office has at least some different underlying factors: The candidates themselves, strategies, the most pressing issues, etc. Yes, candidates often get tied to their partisan counterpart at the highest levels of politics (e.g., local Republicans being lumped together with Trump), but they are still their own candidates with their own races they’re trying to win.
- Elections for different years, even if it is the same office, see different kinds of voter turnout. Presidential elections get the most participation from voters, but not everybody who votes in presidential years votes in midterm elections (e.g., 2022 vs. 2024). So, if you were to use midterm voter turnout to predict presidential voter turnout, you need to account for the fact that there will be a higher rate of turnout and that different kinds of voters are also going to show up.
- Elections don’t necessarily cover the same geographical areas. It’s a little bit easier of a comparison when you are looking at statewide elections, where everybody in a state is going to vote on the contest. Those are races like governor, attorney general, and U.S. Senate. But other contests, like state house or senate, only cover specific parts of the state. So, it’s rather ridiculous when people use such elections individually, like a special election for a state senate seat in 2023, as a bellwether for how a statewide election will go. You might be able to use it to predict how how that specific part of the state will vote in a statewide election.
That said, other election results in Arizona might give us some idea of the state’s partisan trends, even in non-presidential years.
Governor
Let’s start with the highest level of state government. Until the last governor election in Arizona in 2022, Republicans were on a three-contest winning streak. Jan Brewer won the 2010 iteration and Doug Ducey won in 2014 and 2018; none of those were particularly close. But in 2022, Democrat Katie Hobbs defeated Republican Kari Lake, the latter whom tied herself (and was tied by her opponents) to Donald Trump.
- Votes for Katie Hobbs (D): 1,287,891 (50.32% of the total votes)
- Votes for Kari Lake (R): 1,270,774 (49.65% of the total votes)
Like 2020 between Biden and Trump in the state, the 2022 contest between Hobbs and Lake was a nailbiter. While Biden and Trump were separated by less than 11,000 voters, Hobbs and Lake were separated by less than 18,000 votes.
With 2020 and 2022 in mind, does this mean that Arizona voters became that repelled by Trump and “Trump-like” candidates and that they’ll continue to be in the 2024 election? It’s undoubtedly the case for some of these voters, but to just posit that as the sole answer to why Trump and Kari Lake lost is an easy conclusion for Democrats to jump to. Rarely is the answer to why a candidate loses an election so simple, especially one as close as these two Arizona contests. For all we know, the Trump and Lake campaigns had faulty strategies for turning out voters.
If you’re a Democrat, Katie Hobbs’ win is undoubtedly a good sign for Biden’s chances at winning Arizona again in the 2024 election. But regardless of your political stripes, don’t rely on what happened in 2022 too heavily in your predictions. One is a presidential election and one is a midterm election. The voters that turn out for either or both, as a whole, are different. We don’t know if 2020 and 2022 are simply aberrations — or the start of a new trend. You can’t know if a trend is happening until further down the road, when you have more data to reflect on.
U.S. Senate
The most well-known Arizona politician nationally is former U.S. Senate John McCain, who passed away in 2018. The Republican won all six of his campaigns for U.S. Senate from 1986 to 2016. But it wasn’t just him: All nine elections for U.S. Senate in Arizona from 1992 to 2016 were won by Republicans. With the exception of Jeff Flake’s victory in 2012, none of those races were particularly close and several were complete blowouts.
It wasn’t until Democrat Kyrsten Sinema (now an independent) defeated Republican Martha McSally by about 56,000 votes that the Republican streak in U.S. Senate elections in Arizona was broken. Then Democrat Mark Kelly won the special election for McCain’s seat in 2020 by about 79,000 votes and then won a full term for the office in 2022 by about 126,000 votes. After nine straight wins racked up by Republicans for the U.S. Senate, Democrats have picked up three.
One could argue that a trend is beginning to emerge here, and maybe there is. A Democrat won a U.S. Senate seat in a presidential year, then a special election, and then in a midterm year. But Sinema’s reelection prospects in 2024 are murky following her switch to independent from Democrat. That change angered many Democrats, leading to U.S. House Representative Ruben Gallego to throw his hat in the ring. Gallego has since accumulated a massive amount of donations in 2023 for the upcoming race.
For her part, Sinema hasn’t said whether she is running for reelection. As of February 26, 2024, the three main election rating organizations of the Cook Political Report, Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball, and Inside Elections all rate the race as a toss-up. If she does run, Sinema and Gallego could split a lot of votes and open the door for a Republican to win back the seat. That Republican could be Kari Lake, the 2022 gubernatorial candidate, who already declared her candidacy for the seat. Or more Republicans could be willing to vote for Sinema.
But back to the original topic: How does this affect Donald Trump’s attempt to win back the state from Biden in the presidential election? It’s possible recent U.S. Senate elections in Arizona indicate a trend toward Democrats, but it’s still too early to tell whether it really is a trend. The uncertainty that surrounds Sinema also makes it that much more difficult to handicap the 2024 results. Usually, a higher-level race is going to have more impact on the lower-level than the other way around, but it isn’t impossible that what happens in the U.S. Senate race could directly impact the presidential race.
State Legislature
As aforementioned, you should be careful with predictions of a statewide race when looking at races that only cover one geographical area of the state. The voters in one area are only one segment of all the voters in the state. The state legislature in divided into 30 districts, with two house representatives and one senator each. Voters also aren’t equally split between districts.
At the same time, state legislative races in those four counties that we highlighted early on in this article — Maricopa, Pima, Pinal, and Yavapai — could be enlightening in understanding what will happen for the presidential election in Arizona. Every single legislative district, except for District 5, is either contained within or intersects with at least one of those counties. Those four counties, then, factor heavily not just into which presidential candidate wins Arizona but also which party takes control of the state house and state senate.
And for what it’s worth, the majority for Arizona’s state legislative Republicans has mostly decreased since 2010, a year when Republicans found enormous success in state legislative elections across the United States.
The close divide is another indicator of Arizona arguably being a “purple state,” albeit one with a slightly reddish hue. And with Arizona being a rare example were both the entire state house and state senate are up for election every two years, the number of Republican and Democratic winners may once again closely reflect how Arizona votes for president.
The Partisan Affiliations of Arizona Voters
There are 31 states that track the party identification of voters, and Arizona is one of them. This makes it easier to get a basic sense of how voters feel. Party affiliation is the strongest indicator of who a voter will choose in an election, generally speaking.
Below is the general overview of how the division of Democrats, Republicans, and other registered voters was for the past two midterm and presidential elections as well as the latest numbers that Arizona’s Secretary of State’s Office gathered. (“Other Voters” combines third parties and unaffiliated voters, but unaffiliated voters will make up the vast majority of the group.) I chose November 2016 as my starting point as Donald Trump did win Arizona that time and I wanted to have a large-enough timeframe to look at any sort of trend.
In the last four federal elections, Arizona Republicans have had a definitive numbers advantage in registered voters. Arizona Democrats somewhat closed that gap from 2016 to 2020, but it opened back up again from 2020 to the present.
However, both Republicans and Democrats registrations are both at lower levels since Biden took Arizona from Trump. Meanwhile, other voters — particularly those voters unaffiliated with any party — have become more numerous. It may seem like that makes for a lot of swing voters, but independents aren’t necessarily up for grabs by either party. Many of them consistently vote for one party or the other, a fact I discuss both in my book and in other Medium posts. It’s more a matter of which independents will decide to come out to vote for one of the two candidates.
Nevertheless, the sheer advantage Republicans have over Democrats in registered voters has been a part of the GOP’s success in Arizona. Even though Biden won in 2020, it was still an intensely close matchup, and that is somewhat due to the voter party statistics.
2024 in Arizona: Who has the Advantage?
I’m usually not much for predicting elections myself — particularly for president, and especially so long before the election. There is a lot of time for poll numbers to change, campaign donations to roll in, campaign expenditures to be made, etc. There are other factors outside of the scope of this article that were not, or could not, be considered. Democrats and Republicans alike are concerned there will be voter apathy with the rematch between Biden and Trump.
As things stand right now, there is no clear advantage one way or the other. Biden has already beaten Trump in Arizona once, and he has recent statewide election results— governor and U.S. Senate, as well as secretary of state and attorney general — on his side. Trump has voter registration numbers and a slight Republican state legislative majority on his side. Arizona’s closeness may have been somewhat of a surprise to some political observers in the 2020 election. But it won’t be such a shock if that happens again in 2024.
- Note that Dave Leip’s Election Atlas has Republican as blue and Democrats as red, instead of the usual conception of Republicans as red and Democrats as blue. The reasons for this are described here.
