President-elect Donald Trump’s final lead over Vice President Kamala Harris continues to grow as votes from late-counting states are tallied, including in a key swing state that narrowly went for him on election night.
The Western Journal reported on the ongoing tallying in Arizona, a state up for grabs heading into Election Day which Trump ultimately carried after winning the populous Maricopa County, home to more than six in 10 voters. The newest numbers show that Trump trounced Harris by more than 187,000 votes, a figure 18 times larger than the 10,000-vote margin President Joe Biden enjoyed in 2020.
The result is leaving Sun Belt observers questioning the long-held assumption that Arizona is still a swing state; instead, it may be following in the tradition of Ohio, Iowa, and other well-tread battlegrounds that have since become reliably red. With 98.9% of all votes counted, President-elect Trump has extended his Arizona lead to 5.5%, making his win there the largest of all seven swing states.
A contributing factor to Trump’s Arizona victory appears to be his historic growth in support among Hispanic voters who make up more than a third of all voters in Arizona.
In Maricopa County — essentially Phoenix and its surrounding communities — Hispanic Americans swung radically to the right, mirroring results in southern Texas and Miami-Dade County, Florida, both areas Trump won or narrowly lost but increased his share of the electorate by double digits. Similar plays for Hispanic communities were made by the Trump campaign in places like Reading, Pennsylvania, home to a growing community of Puerto Ricans. Trump ultimately carried the state by 1.7%.
Arizona has also been an epicenter in the nation’s reckoning with an illegal immigration crisis that has spiraled out of control. Kari Lake, the failed U.S. Senate candidate, made opposition to the Biden-Harris administration’s border policies a centerpiece of her MAGA-adjacent campaign against Senator-elect Ruben Gallego, whom she accused of complicity in lax border security.
High-profile incidents like the death of Georgia college student Laken Riley compounded the misery for Democrats in places like Arizona where the effects of illegal immigration have become an everyday occurrence and overwhelmed underfunded state agencies left to clean up a federal dilemma.
Latino and Hispanic voters in particular have told pollsters that Trump’s vituperations against immigrant scofflaws have emboldened them to vote for Republicans.
In Arizona, there have been “notable rightward shifts included the Latino-heavy neighborhoods of south and west Phoenix, and the East Valley cities that moved toward Biden four years ago,” AZCentral reported. “Trump’s strength in Maricopa County was particularly stinging for Democrats because of how consequential it was in Biden’s defeat of Trump in 2020.”
Although Harris won the city of Phoenix, “in nearby Gilbert, Trump won by 16 percentage points. He carried Mesa by 12 percentage points and Scottsdale by 9 percentage points.” The president-elect also notched wins in all four of the counties that border Mexico.
I SAID MONTHS AGO THATY TRUMP NEEDED TO WIN WITH SUCH NUMBERS THAT THE DNC PARTY COULD NOT STILL THIS ELECTION WELL WE ALL SEE THAT CAME TO BE (THANK GOD )
so as they keep counting the votes tallies favor Trump, yet somehow they also favored the democrat, who was behind on election day and made up big numbers in the late count, the same late count that kept Trump’s lead growing. For that to happen, that means a lot of Trump voters voted for him but also for the democratic senator, highly unlikely.