Trump’s total Electoral College count moves to 312 to Vice President Kamala Harris’s 226.
President-elect Donald Trump has won Arizona, completing a sweep of the seven battleground states 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 that day.
Trump’s Arizona victory follows then-candidate Joe Biden’s upset win in the state in 2020, a 0.3-point squeaker that was the first time since Bill Clinton’s 1996 win that a Democratic presidential candidate had won the Grand Canyon State. In 2016, Trump won Arizona by 3.5 percentage points.
Polls presaged the former president’s Arizona win. The FiveThirtyEight poll aggregate had Trump leading by 2.2 percentage points on Nov. 4.
Maricopa County, where 62 percent of the state’s 7.4 million residents and more than half of its 4.367 million voters live, proved pivotal. According to unofficial results posted by the Maricopa County Elections Department on the evening of Nov. 9, Trump won the Phoenix-area vote 51.5 percent to 47.2 percent.
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 47.7 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 with less than 19 percent nationally.
While many media outlets 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.
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 on Nov. 8.
Despite the president-elect’s 161,000 vote lead, a significant 6-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.
By John Haughey
