Harris Fights Uphill Against Trump in Arizona, Backed by a Revived Party

PHOENIX — As Vice President Kamala Harris fights for the votes of Americans threatening to abandon the Democratic Party, she faces challenges across the battleground states, from working-class Nevada communities to Arab American enclaves in Michigan.

But perhaps no swing state has vexed Democrats as much this year as Arizona.

A longtime Republican stronghold before President Joe Biden’s victory in 2020, the state is tricky political territory for Democrats, who confront magnified concerns over the number of migrants coming across the U.S.-Mexico border. A handful of polls in recent weeks have shown former President Donald Trump leading Harris by the mid-single digits, even as her numbers have improved in other vital states.

On Friday, Harris will take the stage in a Phoenix suburb alongside her new running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota — part of a renewed push to put Sun Belt states back in play and keep Arizona’s 11 electoral votes in the Democratic column. She faces an uphill battle there as Republicans work to paint her as the architect of the border crisis, but her allies say the energy she has brought to drained Democratic voters could also attract moderate swing voters.

“She seems to have captured some of that lightning in a bottle that the Obama campaign had,” said John Giles, the Republican mayor of Mesa, Arizona, east of Phoenix, who endorsed Harris last month. Still, he cautioned, “she absolutely has to run like she’s behind in Arizona, because I think she is.”

Immigration consistently ranks as a top issue in Arizona, where voters will decide in November whether to make unlawfully crossing the border from Mexico a state crime. Even as border apprehensions have dropped sharply nationwide this year, they have continued to climb in Arizona. Border officials in the area south of Tucson have tallied nearly 430,000 apprehensions and other encounters since October, out of roughly 1.4 million across the entire southwestern border. That is up from about 235,000 in roughly the same time period the year before.

Trump and his allies have hammered Harris on immigration, highlighting her previous statements that “an undocumented immigrant is not a criminal” to portray her as soft on the border. They have castigated her as the “border czar,” though Biden gave her the responsibility of solving the “root causes” of migration from Central America, rather than dealing with problems at the southern border.

A top pro-Trump super political action committee, MAGA Inc., released an advertisement late last month in several battleground states, including Arizona, blasting the vice president over the border. “Why is our border a chaotic mess?” the ad asks. “Kamala Harris.”

But Democrats say Harris has a ready-made defense: It was Trump who this year tanked a bipartisan border deal , which would have effectively mandated that the border be shut down to migrants when numbers reached certain levels and would have vastly expanded detentions and deportations.

“Republicans walked away from this because Donald Trump told them to walk away from it,” Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., who was a top contender to become Harris’ running mate, said in an interview. “They don’t actually want to fix this. They don’t want to solve it. They just want to talk about it.”

Sean McEnerney, Harris’s state campaign manager in Arizona, said Trump’s gamesmanship on the border deal would make for a potent argument. “Arizona voters are not looking for people who are playing politics with this issue,” he said.

Harris’ campaign also believes that abortion will propel voters to her side in November, after the state Supreme Court in April reinstated an 1864 near-total ban on the procedure. The state’s Legislature eventually repealed the ban, but a 15-week restriction is still in effect, and voters will weigh in on a ballot measure that would enshrine the right to an abortion until fetal viability in the state’s constitution.

Harris had some good news Thursday, when the Cook Political Report, a nonpartisan political publication, moved Arizona from “lean Republican” to “toss-up” in its ratings, along with the other Sun Belt swing states of Georgia and Nevada.

“For the first time in a long time, Democrats are united and energized, while Republicans are on their heels,” wrote Amy Walter, the report’s editor-in-chief.

For Harris to capitalize on her momentum, she must reunite the fragile coalition that helped Biden flip Arizona in 2020 for the first time in decades: young people, Latinos, Native Americans, white Phoenix-area suburban voters and moderates who have traditionally voted Republican.

Latino voters, who made up roughly 20% of the state’s electorate four years ago, are particularly important.

Biden won those voters handily in 2020, but as his campaign struggled to energize Democrats this time around, Trump made significant gains with them. At the same time, he called some migrants “animals,” referred to immigration from Latin America as an “invasion” that is “poisoning the blood” of the country — an echo of language used by Adolf Hitler — and vowed mass deportations if elected.

On Thursday, the Harris campaign sought to contrast its approach with Trump’s, releasing an ad in English and Spanish targeted to Latino voters. The ad highlights that Harris, who is Black and of South Asian heritage, was raised by an immigrant mother and worked at McDonald’s as a young woman. It also focuses on her fight against big banks as California’s attorney general and her role in the Biden administration’s efforts to lower costs for expensive prescription drugs.

Latino voters say inflation is a major concern, and the ad reflects Harris’ aggressive tone in talking about big business.

“As our president, determination is how she’ll stop the corporations who gouge our families on rent and groceries,” the ad’s narrator says.

Another new Harris campaign ad takes the border issue head-on, referring to her as a former “border state prosecutor” who took on drug cartels and who will, as president, “hire thousands more border agents and crack down on fentanyl and human trafficking.”

Democrats and Republicans have invested heavily in television advertising in the state. Since Biden dropped out, the Harris campaign and its allies have booked nearly $25 million worth of advertising time through Election Day, according to the media-tracking firm AdImpact. The Trump campaign and its allies have reserved roughly $13.5 million over the same period.

Early signs have emerged that Harris has galvanized her party in Arizona. At polling places during last week’s primary election, Democrats in purple suburbs said they were feeling a newfound resolve.

When Harris stepped in, “I felt a huge sense of relief, like the Democrats actually had a fighting chance,” said Rochelle Garcia, 57, of Glendale. “I have family members who were not going to vote for the office of president, who have changed their minds.”

Skylar Anderson, 28, of Phoenix, said Harris had motivated young voters and people of color like herself.

“It’s amazing to see a woman of color, a Black woman, to be at the top of the ticket,” Anderson said. She and others said Harris needed to blanket the state with appearances and information, to help people get to know her better and “debunk” attacks.

Friday’s rally, when Harris will speak at Desert Diamond Arena in Glendale, northwest of Phoenix, could be the start of that. Her campaign says it has a robust presence in Arizona, with 12 offices across the state and more than 120 full-time staff members. And since Biden dropped out, nearly 21,000 volunteers have signed up.

The Trump campaign said it had more than half a dozen offices around the state, a joint effort with the Republican National Committee.

“Years of the Biden-Harris administration’s failed policies have made living in Arizona harder, less safe, and has left many residents feeling increasingly uncertain about the future,” said Halee Dobbins, the Trump campaign’s Arizona communications director. “Kamala Harris’ open border agenda has normalized a migrant invasion and created a deadly stream of fentanyl flowing into our communities.”

Daniel Scarpinato, a Republican consultant in Arizona and the chief of staff to former Gov. Doug Ducey, said he thought that while Trump had the edge on Arizona voters’ top issues, the race would be extremely tight.

Arizona has become a state, Scarpinato said, where “anybody who’s running statewide, whether it’s for president or state mine inspector, has to view it as a coin flip.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .