The battleground state, where Kamala Harris will rally on Friday, has drifted toward Donald Trump since he lost it in 2020. Democrats hope her momentum could turn their fortunes around there.
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Vice President Kamala Harris during a campaign event in April in Tucson, Ariz. In the early days of her presidential candidacy, she has generally trailed former President Donald J. Trump in polls of the state.
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 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 J. Trump leading Ms. Harris by the mid-single digits, even as her numbers have improved in other vital states.
On Friday, Ms. 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, east of Phoenix, who endorsed Ms. 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.
Mr. Trump and his allies have hammered Ms. 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 Mr. Biden gave her the responsibility of solving the “root causes” of migration from Central America, rather than dealing with problems at the southern border.
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