Lessons From Arizona

The Path Ahead

It’s worth spending some time talking about what happened in Arizona in this past election. While I don’t believe that any one state or any one campaign holds all of the answers as we seek to not only understand what happened in 2024, but what the path forward is for Democrats, it is clear that Arizona holds many of the answers we’re seeking.

The 2024 Data

First, some reminders on the landscape in Arizona. President Biden carried the state by a razor-thin margin of 0.3% of all votes cast. Four years later, Vice President Harris lost by 5.5 points, a net margin drop-off of 5.8%.

When we look at the voter registration trends in the state over the intervening four years, and combine that with the partisan turnout data from each election, it is not surprising that Dem support fell off the table in Arizona. Heading into the 2020 election, the Republican share of all registered voters in the state eclipsed that of registered Democrats by 3 points. By 2024 that margin had more than doubled, to 6.8%.

Look at this chart of party registration among new registrants over the past 3 election years in Arizona. Over the course of 2020, GOPs accounted for a 3pt larger share of new registrants. By 2020, that margin grew to 6 points. In 2024, that margin almost doubled again, to +11 GOP. Simply put, Republicans won the voter registration battle in Arizona (this is for another post, but we witnessed the same thing around the country over the past four years).

What was driving these GOP registration gains? Well, a lot of things, but foremost among them, Hispanic voters. In 2020, new Hispanic registrants in Arizona were +22 Dem. By 2022 the GOP had halved that Democratic advantage, to make it +11 Dem. But the bottom truly fell out for Democrats in 2024, as they had an advantage of only 2.5% among Hispanic new registrants.

Of course, our data allows us to zoom in even closer. And when we do, we find the biggest Democratic deficiencies (and GOP gains) among young Hispanic men. This chart shows the party registration of new registrants Hispanic men under the age of 30 in Arizona for each election cycle. You will see that Dems had a 20 point margin advantage with this group in 2020, dropping to 7 points in 2022, and then flipping entirely to a 7 point GOP advantage in 2024.

So Democrats lost the registration battle in Arizona over the past four years, driven largely by massive GOP increases among Hispanic voters, especially younger men. But this alone doesn’t explain why the state swung from Biden +0.3 to Trump +5.5. As noted above, the state went from GOP +3 in terms of total voter registration in 2020 to GOP +6.8. That’s a swing of 3.8 pts, while the presidential vote swung 5.8 points towards Trump.

What else accounts for the Dem drop-off in Arizona? Voter turnout was a big part of it. If we set the registration aside and just look at party registration shares for those who voted in each election, in 2020 the electorate was +4.7 GOP. In 2024 that surged to +9.2 GOP - a 4.5% improvement in electorate share for the GOP. So, as detailed above, a lot of that improvement was attributable to GOP gains in voter registration. But the rest of that surge was thanks to GOP advantages in turnout.

Now, to be clear, if we are using 2020 as our baseline, it is important to note that turnout in 2024 in Arizona (and the same was true almost everywhere across the US) dropped. 71.5% of registered voters in Arizona cast a ballot in 2020, that dropped to 66.8% in 2024. But as the chart below demonstrates, the drop-off in turnout was more pronounced among Democrats than it was among Republicans.

Dem turnout in Arizona dropped by 4.6 pts, while GOP turnout dropped by 3.1 pts. If we drill down deeper, what’s interesting to me is that the same trends we saw in voter registration in the state over the four year election cycle emerged in the turnout data. As the chart below demonstrates (this chart is showing turnout among young Hispanic voters), Democratic turnout dropped by a massive 7.4 points, while turnout among young Hispanic GOP voters dropped by only 0.5%. Meaning, had we paid attention to the voter registration trends over the preceding four years, we would not have been surprised by this result.

One side note, related to this turnout data - while we talk about swings among Hispanic voters between 2020 and 2024, as these charts show, a not insignificant portion of the swing was attributable to turnout differentials, not the same group of voters changing their vote from Biden in 2020 to Trump in 2024. This is important, and I’ll write more about this sometime soon.

Okay. So Trump went from losing Arizona narrowly in 2020 to winning it fairly comfortably in 2024. And from this data we know that he did this by registering more Republicans over the intervening four years, and working to get GOP turnout to drop by less than Dem turnout. So what is the lesson for Dems here, and the path forward?

The Senate Race

Let me share one more chart here. This includes most of the data I’ve been discussing so far, but adds one component - US Senate races in Arizona. As you’ll notice in the chart, there was the 5.8 pt drop-off in Dem margin in the Presidential race, fueled by the 3.8 point drop in Dem registration share margin, and 4.5 point drop-off in Dem share of overall turnout. But there is one area where the Democratic margin held strong - the US Senate race. Senator Mark Kelly won the state in 2020, winning by a 2.4% margin. And, despite the deficiencies in Democratic registration and turnout in 2024, Senator Ruben Gallego matched that exact margin, carrying the state by 2.4 points.

Let’s dig into this Senate race a little bit, as I think there are some important lessons to learn. Though I should say up front - I am just reacting to voter registration, turnout, and election result statistics. We should be listening to Senator Gallego and his campaign team to better understand the tactics and messaging that allowed them to defy political gravity in Arizona in 2024.

We’re going to start in Greenlee County, which happens to be the least populous county in the state. Why here? Because Senator Gallego ran 4.7% ahead of Vice President Harris in this County, the widest margin between the two at the county level. When we look at the partisan turnout data, we see an even more stark drop-off in Democratic turnout share, relative to 2020. In that election, the Dem share of turnout was 3.8 points less than that of the GOP. In 2024 that margin exploded to +15.8% GOP.

Now, Hispanic voters accounted for about one-third of votes cast in Greenlee County in the 2024 election, about double their share of the statewide vote. So, it would appear Senator Gallego performed better with Hispanic voters, a notion backed up by the exit polls in Arizona, which showed Gallego carrying Hispanics by 22 points, relative to Harris’ 10 point margin.

There were two other counties in Arizona where Gallego outperformed Harris by more than 4 points: Yuma and Santa Cruz. Both are border counties, and heavily Hispanic, so given everything we’ve talked about so far, this over performance shouldn’t come as a surprise.

There’s an important question to be asked here: how did Senator Gallego fight against the current in Arizona and win his Senate race with a margin identical to that of Mark Kelly’s in 2020 (and, coincidentally, also an identical margin to Kyrsten Sinema in her 2018 Senate race)? Again, we should listen to Senator Gallego and his campaign team. But I will note something the Senator told the New York Times in November, after his win was confirmed:

“You could use identity politics to connect, but you’ve got to deliver an economic message at the end,” Mr. Gallego said. “Right now, there’s these two warring camps, and they’re both wrong. You’re going to have to do both.”

This strikes me as at once somewhat obvious, and incredibly insightful, given the amount of effort that has been spent since the election pointing fingers. Senator Gallego leaned heavily on his identity in his campaign: as a second-generation Hispanic American, a military veteran, as someone who was raised by a single mother, and a father. And he successfully leveraged his identity as an entry point into conversations about how he would fight for Arizonans to ensure they had the opportunities made available to him throughout his career.

Speaking of being a fighter, one of Gallego’s ads that stood out most to me, was one that included almost no overt political messaging, but rather scenes of him talking to people of various generations in boxing gyms. You can watch it here. You’ll notice the campaign signs interspersed throughout the ad - “Fighting for Arizona”.

I’m a numbers guy, not a messaging expert. But, just my two cents here: I believe there is a path forward for Dems, where we don’t abandon those who are most vulnerable, exposed, and at risk, especially in the face of a second Trump administration. Democrats are, and always have been, fighters for those who are most in need of help. We believe that government can, and must be, a force for good in people’s lives. Ruben Gallego made that case successfully in Arizona in 2024. Democrats can do the same in 2025 and beyond.