Harris battles Trump uphill in Arizona, backed by revived party – DNyuz

As Vice President Kamala Harris fights for the votes of Americans at risk of abandoning the Democratic Party, she faces challenges in swing states, from working-class Nevada to Arab-American enclaves in Michigan.

But there is likely no other swing state that will stymie Democrats more this year than Arizona.

The state had long been a Republican stronghold before President Biden’s 2020 victory, but it has been a tricky political terrain for Democrats, who face growing concerns about the number of migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. A handful of polls in recent weeks have shown former President Donald J. Trump leading Ms. Harris by mid-single digits, even as her numbers have improved in other key states.

On Friday, Ms. Harris will take the stage in suburban Phoenix alongside her new running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz — part of a renewed effort to bring the Sun Belt states back into play and keep Arizona’s 11 electoral votes in the Democratic column. She faces an uphill battle there, as Republicans try to portray her as the architect of the border crisis, but her allies say the energy she has brought to jaded 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, east of Phoenix, who endorsed Ms. Harris last month. Still, he cautioned: “She absolutely needs to run like she’s behind in Arizona, because I think she is.”

Immigration consistently tops the list of top issues in Arizona, where voters will decide in November whether to make it a state crime to cross the border illegally from Mexico. While border apprehensions have fallen sharply nationwide this year, they have continued to rise in Arizona. Border officials in the area south of Tucson have counted nearly 430,000 apprehensions and other encounters since October, out of about 1.4 million along the entire southwest border. That’s up from about 235,000 during the same period a year earlier.

Mr. Trump and his allies have criticized Ms. Harris on immigration, highlighting her past statements that “an undocumented immigrant is not a criminal” to paint her as soft on the border. They have portrayed her as the “border czar,” even though Mr. Biden has given her the responsibility to fix the “root causes” of migration from Central America, rather than addressing problems at the southern border.

A top pro-Trump super PAC, MAGA Inc., ran an ad in several swing states, including Arizona, late last month booing the vice president across the border. “Why is our border a chaotic mess?” the ad asks. “Kamala Harris.”

But Democrats say Ms. Harris has a ready-made defense: It was Mr. Trump who killed a bipartisan border deal this year that would have effectively closed the border to migrants when numbers reached certain levels and vastly expanded detentions and deportations.

“Republicans walked away from this because Donald Trump told them to walk away from this,” Senator Mark Kelly, the Arizona Democrat who was a leading contender to be Ms. Harris’s running mate, said in an interview. “They don’t really want to solve this. They don’t want to solve it. They just want to talk about it.”

Sean McEnerney, Ms. Harris’ Arizona campaign manager, said Mr. Trump’s games with the border deal would make a powerful argument. “Arizona voters are not looking for people to play politics with this issue,” he said.

Ms. Harris’ campaign also believes abortion will sway voters to its side in November, after the state Supreme Court in April reinstated a nearly complete 1864 ban on the procedure. The state Legislature eventually repealed the ban, but a 15-week restriction remains in place, and voters will weigh in on a ballot proposal that would enshrine the right to abortion up to the viability of the fetus in the state constitution.

Ms. Harris had good news on Thursday when the Cook Political Report, an independent political publication, moved Arizona from “lean Republican” to “tossup” in its ratings, along with fellow Sun Belt swing states Georgia and Nevada.

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

To capitalize on her momentum, Ms. Harris must reunite the fragile coalition that helped Mr. Biden flip Arizona for the first time in decades in 2020: young people, Latinos, Native Americans, white voters from the Phoenix suburbs and moderates who have traditionally voted Republican.

Hispanic voters, who made up about 20 percent of the state’s electorate four years ago, are particularly important.

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

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

Inflation is a major concern for Latin American voters and the ad reflects Ms. Harris’s aggressive tone when it comes to big business.

“As our president, determination is how she will stop the companies that are ripping our families off of rent and groceries,” the ad’s narrator says.

Another new campaign ad from Harris tackles the border issue directly, calling her a former “border states attorney” who busted drug cartels and who, as president, will “hire thousands of additional border agents and crack down on fentanyl and human trafficking.”

Both Democrats and Republicans have invested heavily in television advertising in the state. Since Biden withdrew, Harris’ campaign and its allies have reserved nearly $25 million in advertising time through Election Day, according to media tracking firm AdImpact. Trump’s campaign and its allies have reserved about $13.5 million over the same period.

There are early signs that Ms. Harris has mobilized her party in Arizona. At polling stations during last week’s primary, Democrats in purple suburbs said they felt a newfound resolve.

When Ms. 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 president, but they changed their minds.”

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

“It’s great to see a woman of color, a black woman, at the top of the list,” Ms. Anderson said. She and others said Ms. Harris should flood the state with appearances and information, to help people get to know her better and “expose” attacks.

Friday’s rally, when Ms. Harris will speak at the 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 in the state and more than 120 full-time staffers. And since Mr. Biden withdrew, nearly 21,000 volunteers have signed up.

According to the Trump campaign, there are more than a half-dozen offices spread across the state, a joint effort with the Republican National Committee.

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

Daniel Scarpinato, a Republican consultant in Arizona and chief of staff to former Gov. Doug Ducey, said he thought that while Trump had the upper hand on the issues most important to Arizona voters, the race would be extremely close.

Arizona has become a state, Mr. Scarpinato said, where “anyone running for the entire state, whether it’s president or state inspector of mines, has to think of it as a coin toss.”

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