Kamala Harris, in Arizona, blasts Donald Trump and lauds late John McCain

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Locked in a dead heat against Donald Trump, Kamala Harris came to battleground Arizona on Thursday night and declared herself the underdog in the final stretch of the presidential race.

“This will be a very tight race until the very end. And we are the underdog,” Harris told a crowd of more than 7,000 people at the Rawhide Event Center in the Gila River Indian Community near Chandler. “So we have some hard work ahead of us, but we like hard work.”

Harris was back in the Grand Canyon State Thursday to try to turn this battleground state into what one of her Arizona supporters called the “blue wall of the Southwest” for the second election in a row.

Early voting in Arizona began Wednesday. That means the 2024 election is underway well ahead of Nov. 5.

Harris in Arizona: Live coverage of vice president's campaign trip

The rally in Chandler was Harris’ second time in the state in the last two weeks, a sign her campaign sees Arizona and its 11 electoral votes as a valuable asset on the Electoral College map.

Harris and Trump are neck-and-neck in Arizona, polls show, and the data give Trump a slight, margin-of-error edge.

Harris cast the election as a high-stakes choice between herself and Trump, pointing out the GOP nominee’s past comments about being a “dictator on day one” of his administration to close the southern border and expand oil production, his call for “the termination of all rules ... even those found in the Constitution” and his threats to “go after” political opponents if he’s reelected.

“So much is on the line in this election. Twenty-six days to go. And this is not 2016 or 2020. The stakes are even higher. Because remember, a few months ago, the United States Supreme Court told the former president he is effectively immune from whatever he does in office,” Harris said. “Someone who suggests we should terminate the constitution of the United States should never again stand behind the seal of the president of the United States of America. Never again.”

The Republican National Committee called Harris "dangerously liberal" in a written statement marking her visit to the state.

“Kamala Harris' visit to Phoenix highlights her complete inability to address the destructive consequences of her own radical record and the dangerously liberal Harris-Walz agenda,” Arizona state communications director Halee Dobbins said in a written statement. “The Harris-Walz team is floundering, offering no real plan to address the top concerns hardworking Arizonans are facing.”

Harris made her pitch at the Rawhide Event Center, a venue that is part of a recreated old western town in the metro Phoenix area. The space was decorated with large banners that read “ARIZONA VOTES EARLY” and “A NEW WAY FORWARD.”

The mood was joyous inside the rally. Attendees sang and danced to tunes by Aretha Franklin, Beyoncé, Ariana Grande and Azelia Banks as they waited for the vice president to arrive.

“Who had a brat summer?” the DJ asked when spinning a Charli xcx song that the campaign embraced when President Joe Biden stepped aside in July.

The crowd found some relief from the 100-degree temperatures outdoors, but not by much. It was hot and crowded inside the Rawhide Event Center, and some attendees waved Harris-branded fans to cool off. At least two people were escorted out of the rally by medical staff before Harris took the stage.

The vice president addressed health care, gun violence, recent hurricanes and her middle class upbringing during her speech. She also made several Arizona-specific appeals on the stump.

Harris lauded the late Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona for saving the Affordable Care Act on the Senate floor in 2017.

The vice president was a U.S. senator during that vote, and said the way McCain walked through the doors into the chamber in the early morning hours was “like a movie."

“It needed one vote to keep it intact,” she said. “That vote was the late, great John McCain.”

The crowd cheered as she did the famous “thumbs-down” gesture that McCain used to cast his vote against repealing parts of the law.

Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris participates in a town hall presented by Spanish-language network Univision at University of Nevada, Las Vegas, on Oct. 10, 2024.

Harris also made a pledge that, as president, she would invest in water access and drought resilience for states across the West, including Arizona.

"I promise you, as president, I will continue to invest in drought resilience so that communities like those across Arizona have what you need to thrive,” Harris said.

With less than a month to go until Election Day on Nov. 5, both candidates are hitting the campaign trail to shore up support as the first ballots go out across the state.

Trump will hold his own rally in Prescott Valley on Sunday afternoon. His running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, campaigned in Tucson and Mesa this week.

Arizona was long considered a red state, but Democrats won the presidential race here for the first time in a generation four years ago. Former President Bill Clinton had been the last Democrat to win in decades when he swept the state in 1996.

Now, the left has also made considerable gains in statewide elections. Democrats flipped the governor’s office, the attorney general's office and both U.S. Senate seats during the Trump era.

“Arizona is the blue wall of the southwest,” Tucson Mayor Regina Romero said. “It is the blue wall that will stop Trump and JD Vance.”

Still, Democrats are facing fresh challenges this cycle compared to 2020. Republicans grew their voter registration advantage from 2020 to 2024, data show, which could pose a challenge for Harris.

Democratic Party chair Yolanda Bejarano boosted Arizona’s battleground state status in a speech before Harris took the stage. She brushed off claims that Arizona is a red state and not a purple one.

“Just take a look around this room,” Bejarano said, to applause.

To win in Arizona, the Harris campaign is trying to piece together a wide coalition of voters that includes Republicans and independents, young people, Latino voters and others. Gila River Gov. Stephen Roe Lewis nodded to that coalition during his rally speech, making an appeal to youth, veterans, elders and Native voters.

“Each and every one of our votes matters,” Lewis said. “The Native vote has never been more important because the native vote can and will make a difference in the state of Wisconsin, in the state of Nevada, in the state of North Carolina, in the state of Michigan and right here in this great state of Arizona. That’s what I call that Native Wall of voters."

The Harris campaign has sent a number of high-profile surrogates to Arizona for the start of early voting this week.

Harris’ running mate, Tim Walz, campaigned with second gentleman Doug Emhoff in Phoenix on Wednesday morning and then visited the Gila River Indian Community and a VFW named after McCain in the afternoon.

First lady Jill Biden is campaigning across the state Friday and Saturday, and Harris sent a cast of Hollywood celebrity supporters to the state last weekend that included Kerry Washington, Jennifer Garner and Glenn Close, who played Vance’s grandmother in the film adaptation of his memoir.

Harris was most recently in Arizona at the end of September for a visit to the U.S.-Mexico border. The vice president toured a portion of the border wall, visited a port of entry facility and gave a border security speech.

At the Harris event, some attendees said that Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s conservative policy proposal that Trump has disavowed, was top of mind as they cast their votes.

“What the Republicans have been calling for, like Project 2025 and then Trump's own version of that, has really got me on edge,” said Douglas Miller, a 27-year-old resident of Phoenix who works as a bulk manager at Sprouts. “I've read the document very deeply, and I’ll do anything to prevent that,” Miller said.

Allegra Calderon, a speech language pathologist who lives in Tempe, agreed.

“There's things from Project 2025 that I don't like. Saying stuff like needing identification and deporting people,” Calderon, 36, said.

Calderon is hopeful about Harris’ chance of winning the election this fall, but said that “after 2016, I don't want to be overly optimistic.”

(This story was updated to add new information.)

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Vice President Kamala Harris rallies supporters in Phoenix

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