The path to victory in AZ for Kamala Harris and Democrats run through the suburbs

Democrats have made huge inroads with suburban voters in Arizona since 2016, when Donald Trump won the presidency, leveraging their support to not just take back the presidency in 2020, but to outperform expectations in the 2018 and 2022 midterms.

And the Harris-Walz campaign has boots on the ground in Arizona in an effort to capitalize on the advantage Democrats have gained with those suburban voters in its bid to keep Trump out of the White House and win the Grand Canyon State.

The campaign attributes Arizona’s recent metamorphosis into a swing state, after decades of being reliably red, to white suburban voters being alienated by the Republican Party. Vice President Kamala Harris needs to hang on to those voters — primarily in Maricopa and Pima counties — if she wants to win Arizona.

The campaign is working to reach these voters through phone calls, door-to-door canvassing, advertising and events around the state.

At one such event, a presidential debate watch party at the home of a Democratic precinct committeeman in Phoenix’s Ahwatukee Foothills neighborhood on Sept. 10, “Grey’s Anatomy” actor and former Tucsonan Kate Walsh helped to drum up excitement for Democratic candidates.

“This literally is a life or death election,” Walsh told the crowd of around 30 people gathered for the watch party. “We’ve seen it playing out, not only with the lack of reproductive rights, but also gun violence in schools.”

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Abortion rights in Arizona, as well as other states, have been clawed back since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022. Trump has waffled in his stance on abortion in an apparent effort to find a politically expedient position that won’t anger anti-abortion activists while also not turning off women voters. He has flirted with a nationwide abortion ban, before later saying that he would not sign such a bill into law — though he refused to say he would veto a national ban when asked directly at the debate with Harris — while also praising the three justices that he appointed to the high court for their part in striking down Roe.

Harris has called for the restoration of all the rights previously afforded to women via Roe and has made reproductive rights a centerpiece of her campaign, with members of the local campaign calling it a “winning issue.”

Trump argued during the debate that the fate of abortion regulations are currently where they should be: in the hands of individual states. But strict bans in states like Texas, with exceptions only for medical emergencies where the woman faces immediate death, have put women’s lives and long-term health in danger and forced them to flee the state for necessary medical care for nonviable pregnancies.

Walsh, who previously stumped for Democratic presidential candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, said it was her own background and upbringing that inspired her to publicly support Democrats.

“I grew up as a child of the American dream, the daughter of an immigrant,” she said.

Her father moved to the U.S. from Ireland when he was four years old, and went on to serve two tours in the Korean War. Walsh, who moved to Tucson with her family when she was 11, considers Arizona her home state.

“We grew up working class,” Walsh told the Arizona Mirror. “I’ve had a job since I was 14. Literally, anything over room and board, I was responsible for in my house.”

Walsh only lasted one day at her first job — emptying ashtrays in a Tucson office building. She went on to work at Burger King, and then took a pay cut from $3.30 an hour to $2.75 for a job at Dairy Queen, where she got to work alongside her best friend and eat lots of ice cream.

She told the Mirror that, as the daughter of an immigrant who successfully pursued her dream of becoming an actor, she now believes that her tax dollars should go toward helping others achieve their own dreams by providing them with quality health care, education and a safe place to live and go to school.

“I was always taught to give back and do what I can,” Walsh said.

A staunch advocate for reproductive rights, Walsh was dropped from her parents’ health insurance when she was 20 years old while attending the University of Arizona. From that time until she was about 33, Planned Parenthood was her sole medical provider.

That experience helped her realize the vitality of the care that Planned Parenthood provides when it comes to women’s health in general.

“To see what’s been happening with women’s health has been devastating to me,” Walsh said.

She also said she relates to those currently struggling with student loan debt. Walsh didn’t pay off her $40,000 in student loans until she landed her role as Dr. Addison Montgomery on “Grey’s Anatomy” when she was in her mid-30s.

Walsh — who after her stop in Arizona was headed to campaign for Harris swing states Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — said she loves to have conversations with undecided voters.

“People are so overwhelmed by all the information and all the vitriol and, honestly, in the age of the internet, it’s too much information and people get afraid and they either don’t want to vote or they want a simple answer,” she said.

As someone who had friends and family when she was growing up who hunted, she speaks to those voters about things she called common-sense gun legislation, such as a requirement for background checks.

During the debate watch party in Ahwatukee Foothills, Walsh reacted alongside the crowd of primarily die-hard Democrats cheering as Harris corrected Trump’s false claim that Democrats support murdering babies after they’re born.

After the debate, Walsh urged the watch party crowd to continue to advocate for Democratic candidates and to push their friends and neighbors to do the same.

“I really encourage you to tell all your friends to get out and volunteer and do every single thing we can to lean in before this election,” she said.

Walsh also highlighted the importance of voting not just for president, but for candidates all the way down the ballot.

“That’s who’s making the decisions for your local community and for this state,” she said.

The Harris campaign knows how critical it is to stay engaged with the kinds of voters who attended the watch party, seeing that they helped Democrats gain ground in Arizona in 2018, 2020 and 2022.

While Trump won Arizona when he was elected president in 2016, he lost the state by 10,457 votes to President Joe Biden in 2020. Republicans still control both chambers of the state legislature, but they do so by just one seat, and Democrats believe this could be the year to flip one or both of them.

And in 2022, all of the Trump-endorsed candidates for statewide offices in Arizona lost their races to Democrats.

Democrats have built their largest coordinated campaign to date in Arizona, with 16 field offices — and plans to open three more — with 150 staffers. They plan to continue to remind Arizona voters why they’ve rejected MAGA candidates in the past three elections, including their launch of a botched so-called “audit” of the 2020 election results in Arizona and Republican U.S. Senate Candidate Kari Lake’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2022 gubernatorial race that she lost to Democrat Gov. Katie Hobbs.

“The Arizona Harris-Walz campaign will continue to make sure voters understand the risk Trump and his extreme Project 2025 agenda pose to our fundamental freedoms and our economy, with their plans to ban abortion nationwide and raise taxes on families by nearly $4,000,” Sean McEnerney, Arizona Democratic Coordinated Campaign manager, told the Mirror in a written statement. “Vice President Harris is offering a new way forward for all Americans and to turn the page on Donald Trump and Kari Lake’s era of politics, and that’s why Democrats, Republicans and Independents are coming together to support her in Arizona.”

In a sign of the group’s political power, Arizona Team Trump is also courting undecided suburban voters by training local volunteers in how to talk to their neighbors and friends about the issues that matter to them most, such as inflation and crime.

This is a shift from the campaign’s tactics in 2020, according to Team Trump, when it was more focused on reaching voters through official members of the campaign instead of through local members of the community.

Team Trump uses the office in Scottsdale that it shares with the Arizona Republican Party to reach suburban voters there, with around 10 offices total, across the state, according to the campaign.

The campaign is looking directly to Trump for messaging about abortion rights, a top issue for suburban women, no matter their political affiliation. The former president continues to say that the U.S. Supreme Court rightly placed the responsibility for abortion regulation in the hands of the states. Team Trump says that it’s up to the voters to decide in November whether to enshrine the right to abortion into the state constitution via the Arizona Abortion Access Act.