The Arizona county that could determine the presidency

Maricopa County was Republican country for decades. Now Kamala Harris must win it to lock up Arizona

Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz will need to make a play for Maricopa County if they want to win Arizona. ((Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images))

Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota will conduct the next leg of their running mate rollout tour in Phoenix, Arizona. It’s part of Harris’s increased focus on Arizona. Polling shows she is gaining ground in the state against Donald Trump.

Her campaign has launched a “Republicans for Harris” event in Arizona already, and Mesa’s Republican Mayor John Giles has endorsed her.

The Harris campaign says it has almost 100 full-time staff in the state, and will open 18 offices. Those offices will include one in the city of Tempe and one in North Phoenix, both of which are in Maricopa County.

Harris’s decision to go all-in on Phoenix, specifically Maricopa County, shows that the campaign knows Arizona will be won there.

Historically, Maricopa County was Republican country. In 1964, when Barry Goldwater was wallopped everywhere except the deep South due to his opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, he narrowly won Arizona because he performed well in Maricopa County.

Then in 2000, four years after Bill Clinton broke a perfect streak for Republicans since 1948, George W Bush put Maricopa back in the Republican column and he won it again in 2004. The state’s senior senator John McCain won Maricopa by double digits in 2008, which helped him keep Arizona.

While all that was happening, county Sheriff Joe Arpaio was busy earning a reputation as a tough law enforcement officer, forcing inmates whose lives he believed were too comfortable to wear pink underwear and sleep in tents in the sweltering Arizona heat. His crackdown on undocumented immigrants also served as a template for Donald Trump’s style of politics.

But 2016 showed signs of change. Trump would only win Arizona by 4.1 points and Maricopa by 3.4 points as the largely suburban and urban county began to turn away from the far-right side of Republican politics. The fact that Trump publicly trashed McCain, a beloved politician in the state who won Maricopa by 15 points, likely did not do him any favors. Indeed, McCain would be the last Republican to win a Senate race in Arizona.

In a sign of things to come, Arpaio would lose his race then, too. He did so partly because he faced a criminal investigation — but Trump would later pardon him.

In 2018, Kyrsten Sinema, running as a Democrat, would flip the Senate seat partially because she turned Maricopa a light shade of blue.

In 2020, Mark Kelly, running to finish McCain’s term after McCain’s death, would also flip Maricopa when Joe Biden won the state. Kelly would run up the scoreboard there, beating Blake Masters by 6.4 points in 2022, while Katie Hobbs would beat Kari Lake there in 2022 by 2.4 points for the governorship.

Unsurprisingly, Maricopa has become the focal point of right-wing lies about the 2020 election being stolen. At one point, Republicans even announced they were running an audit where they claimed they were examining for bamboo fibers to determine if China had interfered with the election results. Investigations have shown no evidence of wrongdoing, but that hasn’t stopped such falsehoods from proliferating in the state.

Late last month, Stephen Richer, the Maricopa County recorder and a Republican who pushed back on election lies, lost his primary.

At the same time, Maricopa continues to have a strong anti-Trump contingency. In the May 2024 presidential primary, which took place after Nikki Haley had dropped out, she still netted almost 20 percent of Republican votes.

As a westerner herself from neighboring California, Harris knows the importance of Arizona to holding the Sunbelt — and the momentum she has gained in recent weeks has allowed her to put Arizona in play. On Thursday, the non-partisan Cook Political Report moved Arizona from a state that leans Republican to a toss-up.

But if Harris is to have any hope of winning Arizona as a presidential candidate — and if Ruben Gallego has any hope of winning the Senate race against Lake — they will rely as heavily on Maricopa as Republicans of yore did. Harris’s campaign movements show she’s taking that seriously.