Joe Biden was struggling in Arizona. Could Kamala Harris do better against Donald Trump?
President Joe Biden was forced out of the presidential race in part because of his weak performance against former President Donald Trump in battleground states such as Arizona.
Could Vice President Kamala Harris do better at the top of the ticket?
Arizona Democrats are asking themselves that question as they scramble to line up behind a new nominee a mere 29 days before their party’s national convention. Biden endorsed Harris Sunday when he quit the race, encouraging the party to unite behind her ahead of the November election.
It won’t be easy, but Harris could pull it off, said Chuck Coughlin, a longtime Republican strategist in Arizona who left the party during the Trump era.
“It's like you're in the middle of a Simone Biles double backflip twist and you're gonna have to land it coming out of Chicago, and there's a lot of moving pieces,” Coughlin said. “She's been living in Biden’s shadow for so long, I think it's easy to underestimate her."
Political watchers in Arizona say Harris could reinvigorate the apathetic voters who have said for months that they don’t like any of their presidential options, and that she has a strong message on abortion rights that will resonate here. But Harris also runs the risk of inheriting the Biden administration’s bad reputation on immigration, a big issue in the border state.
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“Is anything going to be invigorating enough for Democrats, young Democrats in particular, to come out and vote?” said Stacy Pearson, an Arizona Democratic strategist. “The answer to that is yes. Kamala Harris can win when young Democrats are energized. So we've now solved the apathy problem. Now we're going to get into the issues.”
“Immigration and abortion will be the two defining issues in Arizona,” Pearson added.
Harris is not a sure bet for the Democratic nominee, but she is the first major Democrat to put her hat in the ring to replace Biden. Some of her most formidable would-be opponents – California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg – have endorsed her. Harris’s next task is rallying support from some 4,000 delegates at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago next month.
A Harris spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.
Arizona is one of the most competitive states on the presidential map. Biden won here by fewer than 11,000 votes in 2020, his most narrow victory of any state, and presidential election polls showed him at risk of losing Arizona this fall. An Emerson College poll conducted after the debate and Trump's attempted assassination showed Biden with 36% of support, 10 percentage points behind Trump in Arizona when third party candidates are added to the mix.
Even before the debate, Biden was running behind Trump and had less support than he did at the same point in the 2020 election.
“Could a different Democrat, Vice President Harris, somebody else, do better in a state like Arizona than Joe Biden?” said Siena College pollster Don Levy, who surveys Arizona for The New York Times. “It's hard to imagine another Democrat not at least having a chance to do better.”
Immigration, a top Arizona issue, could be Harris’s biggest vulnerability, said former Rep. Matt Salmon, R-Ariz.
“She was handed the border. She's not going to be able to get away from that,” Salmon said.
Biden tasked Harris with handling the administration’s immigration policy portfolio during his term, leading to attacks by Republicans for her performance. Harris was given the role of handling immigration at the southern border and working with Central American countries like El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras to address the root of the problem in 2021.
Three years later, voters in Arizona said they were dissatisfied with the administration's immigration policy. A CBS News/YouGov poll conducted in May found that 68% of registered voters think Biden's administration has been “too easy on immigrants trying to cross the border.” Biden shifted rightward in response, announcing new asylum restrictions that reduced encounters at the border.
“All of the sort of conventional wisdom is maybe she does a little bit better nationally than Biden. I don't think she does better in this state. Her first initiative that she was given that was a clear challenge for the administration was border security,” said Chad Heywood, former executive director of the Arizona Republican Party. “Most people feel that she did not do a good job of managing that situation. She didn't lead on it, didn't manage it well.”
Harris could combat some of the attacks by taking Trump to task for blocking an immigration bill in Congress this year, Coughlin said, and highlight that U.S. Customs and Border Protection data show encounters at the border have been trending downward over the last four months. Pearson agreed, and pointed to voters rejecting Republican Joe Arpaio’s bid for another term as Maricopa County Sheriff in 2016.
“Arizonans have continuously rejected extreme positions on immigration,” Pearson said.
Arizonans overall have a negative perception of the country’s direction, immigration and the economy. But Biden’s most difficult electoral struggles were unique to him, Levy said, especially when it came to voter perception about his age and ability to do the job of being president for another four years. Despite Biden’s anemic approval rating, Democrats made major gains in Arizona during the Trump era, sending Democrat Mark Kelly to the Senate and flipping the governor’s office, the secretary of state’s office and the attorney general’s office, among other victories.
So far, Arizona Democrats largely have announced their support for Harris or have opted to stay quiet. It’s a sign that the party is breathing a sigh of relief that a new candidate will take over the ticket after Biden’s disastrous debate performance.
ActBlue, an online fundraising platform for Democrats, reported raising $46.7 million from small-dollar donors in the first hours of Harris’s campaign.
“It just injects enthusiasm, where there was very little, into the Democratic position,” Coughlin said.
Kelly and former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords were quick to endorse Harris when she entered the fray. Kelly is often named as a potential Harris running mate, with the chatter growing so loud that the Arizona Republican Party sent out a fundraising email on Sunday asking “Can you believe the Democrats think Mark Kelly should be the Vice Presidential pick for Kamala Harris?”
Harris also has new support from Reps. Greg Stanton and Raúl Grijalva, two Democrats who publicly pressured Biden to step aside. Two of Arizona’s 85 delegates to the Democratic National Convention told The Arizona Republic on Sunday morning that they plan to cast their votes for Harris, and a third said the same on social media.
“As we move forward as a party and as a country, we must come together and rally behind Vice President Kamala Harris as our next president of the United States,” Markus Ceniceros, an Arizona delegate, said in a text message.
Harris has spent considerable time in Arizona, making six trips here to campaign and represent the Biden administration during her time in office. The vice president came to the state most recently in June to mark the overturning of the landmark abortion case Roe vs. Wade. Second gentleman Doug Emhoff was in Phoenix Friday to campaign and catch the beginning of the WNBA All-Star Weekend.
Harris has campaigned hard on abortion rights, an issue that is on track to be on the ballot this fall. An initiative to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution is expected to drive turnout on the left, following similar measures in states like Ohio, Kentucky and Kansas.
The outpouring of support could be a double-edged sword. Harris may face a challenge with voters if they perceive her as being “anointed” as the nominee rather than competing in an open convention process, Salmon said. The former U.S. House member did not share who he plans to vote for this fall.
“They've been making democracy and the protection of democracy one of the big themes in fighting against Donald Trump for the last year or so,” Salmon said. “So to now have a process that seems very undemocratic, where they just coronate somebody and then shove her down everybody's throat, I don't think that's going to go down well.”
Harris seemed to guard against that perception in her presidential campaign announcement.
“My intention is to earn and win this nomination,” she wrote.
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This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Could Kamala Harris defeat Donald Trump in swing state Arizona?
