Arizona has a half-century habit of sending Washington politicians who break with their own party. Barry Goldwater, the 1964 Republican presidential nominee, lost 44 states to Lyndon Johnson and carried only six — among them his home state, by eight-tenths of a point (R+0.8). John McCain, the 2008 nominee and a self-styled maverick across two decades in the Senate, cast the late-night vote that sank his own party’s repeal of the Affordable Care Act in July 2017.
The pattern held. Jeff Flake, a Republican senator, declined to seek re-election in 2018 after a public break with President Trump; Kyrsten Sinema, elected as a Democrat that same year, left the party in December 2022 to sit as an independent; and Ruben Gallego, a Democrat, won Sinema’s seat in 2024. The state those careers run through is now one of the nation’s closest — Republican for president from 2000 through 2016, then Joe Biden by three-tenths of a point in 2020, its first Democratic win since 1996, and Donald Trump back by 5.5 in 2024.
That 1996 win was Bill Clinton’s, by 2.2 points — and it came the same year he lost Colorado, the two states trading places in a single pair of elections. The geography of those two Democratic moments rhymes with the present: by Akashic’s analysis the Arizona counties that swung toward Clinton from 1992 to 1996 are largely the ones that swung toward Trump from 2020 to 2024, the two shifts tracking across the state’s fifteen counties at a correlation of 0.58 and both running strongest in the heavily Hispanic border counties. Santa Cruz County, 83 percent Hispanic, moved thirty points toward Clinton across those cycles, then seventeen back toward Trump — the same working-class Latino ground realigning twice, a generation apart.
Underneath the politics is a fast-growing state of 7.4 million. Hispanic or Latino residents make up 31.4 percent of the population, most of Mexican origin; American Indians add another 3.2 percent, concentrated on the Navajo Nation and other tribal lands, where Apache County is 71 percent Native. Arizona also holds the fourth-largest Latter-day Saint share of any state, at 6.1 percent. The cross-currents run beneath what is now one of the country’s hardest-fought battlegrounds.
Akashic