Connor Gentry, a student at Arizona State University, has been distracted from his studies in recent weeks as he immersed himself in Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign.
“I’ve been working 10 hours a day, knocking on doors, calling voters, telling my loved ones to vote. I’m working my ass off,” he said.
Gentry believes the contest between Harris and former president Donald Trump will be a “coin toss” in the battleground state of Arizona, a view shared by some pollsters and political analysts.
“It’s going to go either way,” Gentry said. “And I think that this [campaign] work that we’re doing will make the difference.”
With polls showing Trump holding a slight lead in Arizona in the final days of the campaign, Harris’s 200-strong team in 19 offices across the state is fighting a broad ground war to peel off votes from groups that have tended to back Republicans in the past.
Among them: rural voters, Mormons and disillusioned conservatives raised on the brand of western-state Republicanism championed by the late Arizona senators Barry Goldwater and John McCain.
The election is likely to come down to “which campaign can better turn out a relative handful of voters”, said Andrei Cherny, former chair of the Arizona Democratic party. “It’s a risky proposition.”
Arizona is one of seven key swing states that could determine the outcome of the race. Republicans won Arizona in every election from 1952 to 1996, when Bill Clinton broke the streak.
President Joe Biden narrowly beat Trump in 2020, igniting protests by the former president’s supporters that spread around the country, culminating in the January 6, 2021, attack on the US capitol. Since then the state has elected a Democrat, Katie Hobbs, as governor.
The Trump campaign has 10 regional offices in the state but has entrusted much of its Arizona ground game to two political action committees, Turning Point USA and Elon Musk’s upstart America Pac. The groups have struggled to match the Harris campaign in manpower and money, local pollsters said.
“The ground game for Republicans is probably not as organised or robust as Harris and the Democrats’ is right now, which is weird because Republicans always had a better ground game in Arizona,” said Mike Noble, founder and chief executive of Nobel Predictive Insights, a research firm.
“The Democrats are flush with cash, whereas the Republicans are just struggling on the money front.”
He said Turning Point has focused on encouraging young people, particularly men, to vote for Trump. Turning Point did not return calls seeking comment.
The Trump campaign said it was mobilising across Arizona to “contact every voter and send President Trump back to the White House”.
Donald Trump Jr served as the face of this outreach this week as he hosted a “phone banking” session in Phoenix and meetings with members of the state’s Assyrian community.
Trump has two main issues working in his favour in Arizona: a state economy that has been rocked by a sharp rise in home prices during the Biden administration and concerns about illegal crossings at its southern border.
Trump devoted much of a speech this week in Tempe to “the migrant invasion”.
He promised to employ an obscure law, the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, to begin “the largest deportation programme in American history” — rhetoric that could turn off Latino voters in Arizona.
Trump, who has visited the state four times this year, is expected to return to Arizona once more before the November 5 election. Harris will be in the state on Thursday.
Polls indicate that Harris’s strongest issue in Arizona is abortion rights, which will be on the Arizona ballot as a state constitutional amendment. Known as Proposition 139, the measure would enshrine abortion as a “fundamental right” up until about the 24th week of pregnancy.
Abortion rights have driven Democratic victories across the country since the US Supreme Court overturned Roe vs Wade in 2022. In Arizona, the issue took on even greater significance after the state’s Supreme Court revived an 1864 law that criminalised most abortions.
The ruling was overturned, but the Harris campaign is spending heavily on advertisements emphasising women’s reproductive rights in Arizona. It is also organising meetups to spread the word.
At a small café in Tempe this week, a group of about 80 women met for a “ballot party” focused on abortion rights. Some women at the gathering — where they made friendship bracelets, listened to Taylor Swift and sipped mocktails — said they had been Republican voters in the past but had switched parties in part because of Trump’s position on abortion.
Milly Franks had been a Republican for most of her life, but said she has been knocking on doors for Harris in communities around the state to talk about abortion rights and other issues. “I’ve never been political before,” she said. “But I believe in women’s rights.”
In a bid to lure other conservatives, the Harris team has enlisted Jeff Flake, the former Republican senator from Arizona and US ambassador to Turkey, to stump for her campaign. Flake is also a Mormon, a conservative religious group that makes up about 6 per cent of the state’s population.
“I’m not voting for a Democrat in spite of being a conservative, but because I’m a conservative,” he told voters this week on a conference call, citing Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election.
“If you have somebody who doesn’t respect elections, then little else matters.”
Harris’s team is also trying to pick up votes in very conservative rural areas such as Yuma, near the US-Mexico border, where Biden lost to Trump by 4,300 votes out of about 69,000.
And the campaign has dedicated 29 full-time staffers to get out the Native American vote — an effort highlighted by Biden’s visit this week to Arizona’s Gila River Indian Community to apologise for the “sin” of a US programme that separated children from their parents.
Perhaps the Trump team’s most unusual interaction with voters this week was Trump Jr’s visit to the Tombstone Tactical gun store, where he handled a shotgun, a handgun and a rifle.
He also questioned Harris’s knowledge of the safety mechanism on a Glock pistol, which she recently revealed she has owned “for quite some time”. The assembled gun enthusiasts laughed in appreciation.
In brief remarks, Trump Jr said he felt “very good” about the campaigns in Arizona and the other swing states — and made a closing argument for why voters should return his father to the White House.
“They’ve had four years to actually do something, and all they’ve done is make things worse,” he said of the Biden-Harris administration. “We can change that. This one’s sort of a no-brainer.”
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