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President-elect Joe Biden has officially won Arizona, delivering another victory for Democrats who have been trying to topple the Republican stronghold for decades.
Biden officially broke the 270 electoral college tally on Saturday after Pennsylvania and Nevada were called up for him and Kamala Harris, but Arizona’s addition of 11 votes to his victory column is historic. The state last voted for a Democrat in 1996 when Ross Perot’s candidacy for a third helped Bill Clinton defeat Republican Bob Dole. Prior to that, Arizona had not voted for a Democrat since 1948.
Arizona’s result was called by the decision-making office at 8:29 p.m. local time with about 24,738 ballots remaining to be counted, according to the state’s election tracking.
The announcement comes days after The Associated Press and Fox News that Biden won Arizona, scandalizing the Trump campaign at what was seen as an early call. Candidates cannot request a recount in Arizona, and the margin to trigger an automatic recount is an extremely slim 0.1% gap between candidates.
The vast majority of the votes in Arizona had been counted by 3 am Wednesday, but about 2.3 million voters in Arizona voted early and there were still about 250,000 mail-in ballots to count. The ballots came largely from Maricopa County, which contains the majority Democratic city of Phoenix and 60 percent of the state’s vote. This led many to believe that the remaining ballots would bring Biden a clear victory, although Trump’s team insisted he would be victorious.
In an article on his decision to call the state for Biden published Thursday, the PA explained that he believed there was no way Trump could make up for the remaining votes to count.
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Other outlets, however, weren’t so sure. In most states across the country, mail ballots lean heavily in favor of Biden, as Trump had asked his supporters not to trust the Postal Service and to vote in person instead. But Arizona has a strong postal voting program that has been the primary method of voting in the state for both parties for years. Of the remaining mail-in ballots to be counted, it was possible that more of them were from Republicans than was the case in other states.
Although the 2020 race is woefully close in many states, Biden won more votes in previously solidly Republican states like Arizona and Georgia than any other Democratic candidate in years.
For a long time, Arizona was almost as conservative as any state could be. This is the home state of Barry Goldwater, a five-term Conservative senator who inspired a generation of small-government Republicans. John McCain, who was the Republican candidate against President Barack Obama in the 2008 election, represented Arizona in Congress from 1983 until his death from brain cancer in 2018. For years the two Senate seats Arizona has always been occupied by Republicans, and how the state votes in presidential elections wasn’t even a question. The state has not voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since Bill Clinton in 1996.
Recently, however, the demographics of the state have changed dramatically. The state’s large cities have drawn people from neighboring democratic states with rising housing costs like California, and the state’s Latino population has grown to nearly a third of its residents. Since the last presidential election, many Latino residents of Arizona have come of age and voted for the first time.
In 2018, Arizona elected Democratic Senator Kyrsten Sinema to power, defeating Republican candidate Martha McSally. But when the other Arizona Senate seat was vacated by McCain’s death, Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey appointed McSally to fill it.
On Thursday, McSally lost her Senate race again when she was defeated by Democratic challenger Mark Kelly, an astronaut and the husband of former Arizona Rep. Gabby Giffords, who was shot dead in the shooting at 2011 in Tucson which left six dead.
Former Arizona Senators Jeff Flake and McCain were two of the very few Republicans who consistently speak out against Trump. Although Flake often voted with the rest of his party, he was a vocal opponent of Trump and announced in 2017 that he would not seek re-election, citing his disgust for the president as the main reason he was stepping down from his post. seat.
Even more controversial was the relationship between McCain and Trump. During Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, McCain did not hesitate to criticize Trump’s behavior and policies, saying he disagreed with Trump’s comments on immigration and saying that his rhetoric “had set madmen on fire.” In turn, Trump openly mocked McCain – who was captured and tortured while serving in the Vietnam War in the 1960s – by saying at a public event in 2015 that McCain was not a war hero “because he was captured” and “I like people who weren’t captured”. ‘not captured. “
The feud continued throughout Trump’s presidency, and even after McCain’s death. In 2017, after being diagnosed with brain cancer, McCain was the decisive vote against Trump’s attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act, triggering critical tweets from the president. After his death in August 2018, Trump did not attend his funeral and continued to tweet derogatory statements about the late senator, including calling him “bottom of his class” in college and, bizarrely, say during a rally 2019 that he organized “the kind of funeral [McCain] wanted “, but that Trump” did not get any thanks. Trump added that he “was not a fan of John McCain”.
This year, Cindy McCain, wife of the late senator, approved Biden for the presidency, saying Biden was “the only candidate in this race to stand up for our values as a nation.”
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