Arizona 2024 Presidential Election Review
Author’s Note: All 2024 Election Reviews can be found here.
Outcome
Trump +5.5% (+187,382)
Trump +4.7% (+159,659)
Preface
Although it may not hold the most electoral votes of any of the battleground states, Arizona is symbolically ground zero of the election integrity crisis in America. President Trump was on his way to an Election Night reelection win on November 3, 2020, when suddenly, Fox News came in with the call of Arizona for Biden, with hardly any of the vote counted. Keep in mind, this wasn’t like when someone takes a whiff of exit polls in Massachusetts and makes a call as soon as polls close. This was and is a travesty.
Arizona is the most loyal of all Republican presidential states since the second half of the 20th century. After supporting Democrat Harry Truman in 1948, the state (and Maricopa County) flipped for Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952 and failed to back the GOP nominee just one time between then and 2016 (1996, when Bill Clinton beat Bob Dole thanks to Perot, but still lost Maricopa County). Trump won the state and Maricopa County in 2016 despite having more enemies than friends in Arizona, but despite what turned out to be a record net new vote gain for any Republican both statewide and in Maricopa, Trump somehow “lost” the state (and Maricopa) to Joe Biden by 10,457 ballots in America’s 2020 quasi-election.
Multiple Republican factions make it difficult to run with party unity as a tailwind. There is a legacy faction of McCain Republicans (neocons), particularly in affluent portions of Maricopa County, who cross party lines out of spite, a true conservative (sarcasm) wing of Republicans, which is full of members who behave politically like their GOP-breakaway Utahn counterparts in that they’ll criticize the old establishment wing, but clutch their pearls over candidates who beat their own in primaries, and finally, Trump-style populists who want to burn the existing system to the ground and understandably struggle to collaborate with the two other groups who seem hellbent on destroying their outsider candidates. Those former two groups have made political life unnecessarily difficult for Kari Lake’s campaigns in 2022 and 2024.
Throughout the cycle, Arizona consistently ranked as the most likely Trump battleground win even according to mainstream pollsters. Arizona, with its prolific mail-in balloting and transparency-proof counting system, knows no margin too big to manipulate, so I took any pro-Trump or pro-Lake polling with a grain of salt. Ultimately, I figured Trump would carry the state because easier and less conspicuous ways to push Harris to 270 electoral votes existed without having to push back against the heavy rightward shift of the Hispanic working class in the Southwest, and letting the state go back where it belongs would get a lot of bad actors off the hook in Maricopa County while giving opportunity to manipulate down ballot races with fewer people standing in protest of a prolonged count since the presidency would be unimpacted. It turns out Arizona did get a lot of attention for its election administration, and none of it was good. I arrived at my prediction of Trump +4.7%, which turned out to be accurate to within 0.8% (my second most accurate battleground state prediction behind only Nevada by margin), by taking the average of my pessimistic model (Trump +1.4%) and the registration model (Trump +5.8%), and then because all 15 counties showed a GOP registration shift in the past four years, splitting the difference between the average and the registration model.
Analysis
· All 15 counties in Arizona showed a shift in registration toward the Republican Party from 2020 to 2024, moving the state from R+3.0% to R+6.8%. Yuma and Navajo Counties flipped to a Republican advantage, and the shift in Maricopa County more than doubled the previous GOP registration advantage in the county by raw numbers:
· Trump improved in all 15 counties both by percentage margin and by raw vote margin, as shown below:
· Maricopa County, unable to retain all its counterfeit 2020 ballots, flipped back to Trump, with the margin moving rightward by 116,624 ballots. Trump’s performance in Santa Cruz County, which is over 80% Hispanic, was the best for a GOP nominee since 1988 (16.9% improvement), as was his performance in Apache County (14.7% improvement), which is roughly three-quarters Native American. Key to Trump’s statewide triumph was his improvement in Maricopa (metro Phoenix) and Pima (metro Tucson) Counties, which make up three-quarters of the statewide vote together and improved by 136,066 ballots collectively from 2020:
· Trump’s gains, thanks to strong Republican turnout and improved support from Latinos and Native Americans, were strong in the outlying counties, where he grew his margins in them by 61,773 votes. His biggest gains in raw vote margin outside of Maricopa and Pima Counties were in Pinal (+14,299) and Yavapai (+8,704) Counties; his improvement in the outlying 13 counties was sizeable enough to have provided a winning margin inside 2 points even if Trump did not improve in the two largest counties:
· Harris gained ballots over Biden’s 2020 ballot counts in just one county – Pinal (+5,550). I have discussed my concerns with the county’s elections with Sheriff Mark Lamb, who ran for the GOP nomination for U.S. Senate against Lake last year. Most of the Democrat growth there is along the border with Maricopa County, which is a cause for immediate concern. Harris lagged Biden in the 14 other counties, and fell short of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 counts in Greenlee and Santa Cruz Counties. Three-cycle contrast map below:
· Harris dropped 60,758 ballots from Biden’s 2020 count in Maricopa County; additionally, for the first election since 1944, the county certified fewer total ballots than the preceding election (2020 in this case). This is a surefire corroboration, especially given the continued high growth of Maricopa County, of analysis and claims suggesting that the 2020 election was a third world spectacle and cheat fest of epic proportions. Harris was down 89,283 from Biden statewide.
Quality Checks
Statewide Presidential Ballot Count
· 2004 2,016,102
· 2008 2,303,838 (+287,736, +14.3%)
· 2012 2,306,559 (+2,721, +0.1%)
· 2016 2,604,657 (+298,098, +12.9%)
· 2020 3,397,388 (+792,731, +30.4%)
· 2024 3,400,726 (+3,338, +0.1%)
I have repeatedly pointed out that the spike in ballots counted in 2020 does not reconcile with a decade the U.S. Census Bureau concluded had the lowest population gain in the state of any decade since the 1980s, and in Maricopa County since the 1970s. Jumps of roughly 300,000 ballots have happened twice in the new millennium, but a spike in ballots more than 2.5 times that size miraculously brought enough Democrat votes to vanquish all Republican vote gain records in the 2020 election, in a state that always backs GOP presidential nominees. Of course it stinks, and unfortunately, you can blame the Arizona Republican Party for making mail-in balloting so common that it enables the state’s own electoral demise.
Turnout in 2024 was almost exactly equal to statewide turnout in 2020, and when looking at the growth over two cycles (+796,069), I wouldn’t have expected a total of 3.4 million votes until the 2030s based on previous Arizona growth cycles if you’d asked me eight years ago when such growth would come to fruition. Maricopa and Pima Counties are essential for possible Democrat victories in the state, which are needed by the McCain Republican class to extinguish the populist movement that has relegated them to irrelevance. By the looks of the county breakdowns, Maricopa, Pima, and Pinal Counties seem to have retained most of their Democrat ballot collection capabilities, although the former two lost Hispanic working-class votes to Trump organically, as is clear by shifts and specific precinct flips.
Key Counties
Maricopa County
A wretched hive of scum and villainy, if ever such a county were to be called such. Arizona political life is rife with corruption impacting both parties, who are largely owned and operated by lobbyists and other corrupt groups. Maricopa is the largest county in the state by population, and it accounted for 60.6% of all ballots cast in the 2024 presidential race.
The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, which has a 4 to 1 Republican makeup, has been extremely hostile to its own citizens since the 2020 election, especially those irate over the conduct of recent elections. Steve Chucri fled the scene in 2021, and Jack Sellers, Clint Hickman, and Bill Gates all ditched in tandem in 2024. The county not only maintains a permanent mail-in balloting list that dispenses ballots without voters needing to request them, but allows a third-party (Runbeck Election Services) to destroy the concept of proper chain of custody and handle mail ballots for the multiple weeks it takes the county to finish counting votes.
Maricopa ran up a large Republican registration advantage in the past four years, enough to flip back the county for Trump despite the baked-in mail cheating, but many registered Republicans, mostly of the McCainite variety, continue to push the county well to the left of what the GOP advantage would suggest. Future Republican victories will hinge not only on not losing further ground in the Phoenix suburbs, but in denting Democrat margins with the Hispanic working-class that populates much of core Phoenix. Republicans fortunately flipped the Sheriff’s office and elected Justin Heap as Recorder, replacing the insufferable wiseass Stephen Richer, who like the Maricopa Board, mocked county citizens for expecting transparent elections in which the county didn’t intervene to force equipment to malfunction and subsequently suppress voters, as they did to prevent Kari Lake from becoming governor in the 2022 race. Heap will be an essential player in pushing reforms to the way the county handles transparency and in cleaning up its permanent mail-in list, which harbors countless ineligible registrations that still qualify for an automatic ballot, which runs the risk of being intercepted and returned over a lengthy early voting window. Republicans must run as close to even as possible in Maricopa to feel comfortable about statewide wins.
Pima County
Pima County is nearly as corrupt as Maricopa, but with only about a quarter of the ballot count. The county Recorder, Gabriella Cazares-Kelly, got caught overseeing a corrupt system in which someone within the county, perhaps even someone working for the county, is spotting available registrations in the change-of-address database to assign fraudulent mail requests to. Given an opportunity to clear the air and dismiss any such accusations, Cazares-Kelly has done nothing but ignore legislature inquiries into the matter, which suggests to me she knows exactly what is going on there.
This county is an uphill climb for the GOP with a heavily urbanized Hispanic working-class population throughout Tucson, and the college population of the University of Arizona; however, Trump gained 19,442 in margin back from 2020, which was partly because ballot stuffing efforts couldn’t create the same ballot count for Harris as for Biden in 2020 due to Trump’s improved Hispanic performance. The prospect of maladministration of elections in Pima County is particularly troublesome in races like the one for County Sheriff, which was decided for the incumbent Democrat by just 481 ballots out of nearly a half million cast for that race.
Opportunities for Election Manipulation
Familiarize yourself with the grading criteria for my election ratings. Here is how Arizona rates with regard to the most common election demerits and its own unique traits:
· Voter ID – Arizona has identification requirements but does not require a photo ID.
· Same Day Registration – Arizona does not permit same day registration.
· Ballot Harvesting – Arizona classifies the return of a mail-in ballot by anyone other than a family member, household member, or caregiver as a felony offense; however, with recent aberrations to historic voting patterns and Marc Elias’s staunch resistance to citizens monitoring drop boxes for such offenses, you can decide for yourself if you think this is going on. I think you know the answer.
· Unique Corruption – Arizona has several examples of unique corruption. The first and most widely known is the fact that vote counting takes roughly two weeks to complete, even though the state has only one-third the population of Florida, which can count nearly all its votes by the end of Election Night. Additionally, Arizona has well-documented evidence that signature verification of mail-in ballots is vastly insufficient and not able to spot fraudulently submitted mail-in ballots. Newfound suggestive evidence of corruption in Pima County is yet another example of why Arizona is uniquely corrupt with regard to administering fair and transparent elections.
· Automatic Voter Registration – Arizona does not operate Automatic Voter Registration.
· Excessive Mail-In Balloting – Arizona’s largest counties maintain permanent mail-in balloting lists, which dispense ballots to all registrants regardless of whether they are still alive or eligible to vote. Nearly every voter in Maricopa County either receives mail-in ballots they should not have or knows someone that does. This is a serious problem Stephen Richer had no answer for.
The Road Ahead
Arizona belongs in the Republican column as much today as it did in the glory days of mega margins in the late 20th century; unfortunately, the party is divided into urban and rural factions and can’t figure out what it wants to be when it grows up, which leaves it flapping in the wind against Democrats who are hellbent on taking over the state. Despite all the issues above, the GOP expanded its legislative majority in both state chambers, and now has the opportunity to present a “Florida style” election counting bill. Katie Hobbs, the state’s embattled governor elected under circumstances that would make Stalin blush, will face pressure to either sign it to clear up a real problem that will resonate with middle-of-the-road voters she needs for reelection in 2026, or will veto it and confirm for everyone that she needs the slow counting and lack of transparency to wind up on top once counting concludes.
Arizona’s election laws and rules are unacceptably bad for a state that has been governed by Republicans for so long at nearly every level, save for two governors in the past four decades. The GOP brought mail-in balloting in, then developed it to the levels seen today, and has failed to clean up the voter registration database that made it into the news cycle near the end of the campaign. Not much will get done to fix elections as long as Hobbs remains governor, but mail-in balloting must be regulated (no more automatic sendouts) and curbed in all counties, including those in distant corners of the state where harvesting is occurring on reservations, if Republicans want to stop the negative momentum and sinking feeling in a state that should be bolstered by the transformation of the minority working class voter.
It is hard for anyone of any political persuasion to disagree that Arizona is a national embarrassment when it comes to running elections. Had Trump won North Carolina, Georgia, and Wisconsin, but lost Pennsylvania and Michigan, America would have waited for two weeks for Arizona to determine the winner of the presidency. That is unacceptable and must be fixed.
Final Grade and Closing Commentary
The Top 5 Election Integrity Targets in Arizona are (in no order):
· Maricopa County
· Pima County
· Pinal County
· Coconino County
· Navajo County
Most Suspect Outcome
· Arizona U.S. Senate – Kari Lake’s race against Ruben Gallego, which she supposedly lost by 80,574 ballots, is the race everyone is talking about. The reason people don’t know what to think about the result is because Arizona offers little transparency into the counting processes of its largest counties, and after several days, these counties drop large vote batches that cause media outlets to call races prematurely (see the 2022 Attorney General race for a closer example).
With numerous chain of custody failures, permanent mail-in balloting lists, and documented admissions of maladministration against Lake, is should be well understood why people think a race counted for two weeks under such circumstances may be fraudulent. The challenges in proving it are that the top of the ticket followed registration trends, Harris lagged Biden in all but one county, and disagreements over what the ticket splitting rate between Trump and Lake should have been. For reference, Lake told me a month before the election she was only 2 points behind Trump, right around the time polling in her race began to tighten. Transparency is the ultimate source of distrust in all suspicious election results in Arizona.
Arizona receives a Grade of 3 - Elevated Concern – based on its demerits, known troubles, no-excuse permanent mail-in balloting lists, chain of custody failures, and entrenched political corruption. With more disruption present in the presidential race, Arizona would have a better case for a Grade of 4 – Highest Concern; the U.S. Senate race in Arizona, obscured by Arizona’s deliberate lack of transparency and prolonged counting, stands as possibly the biggest question mark of the cycle.
Demerits: Excessive Mail-In Balloting, Ballot Harvesting, Unique Corruption, Prolonged Counting, Deliberate Lack of Transparency
Seth Keshel, MBA, is a former Army Captain of Military Intelligence and Afghanistan veteran. His analytical method of election forecasting and analytics is known worldwide, and he has been commended by President Donald J. Trump for his work in the field.
You will NEVER convince me that Trump won Arizona and Lake lost. She was cheated out of her win, period.
Arizona and California, endless embarrassing,fraudulent counting.