Donald Trump and Kamala Harris were neck-and-neck in initial statewide results posted shortly after polls closed Tuesday night, making this year’s unprecedented and unpredictable race for the White House too close to call on Tuesday evening.
Trump led narrowly, according to incomplete, unofficial results posted Wednesday by the Arizona Secretary of State in the 3 a.m. hour, and had expanded his lead slightly from earlier in the night.
On the county level, initial results showed Harris narrowly leading Trump in vote-rich Maricopa County shortly after polls closed Tuesday night. Approximately 60% of Arizona voters live in Maricopa County.
The Maricopa County results represented 1.1 million ballots, which make up 43.43% of the county’s 2.5 million voters eligible to cast ballots in the election. The county expects 2.1 million voters to turn out and estimates 700,000 ballots are left to tabulate in the coming days.
Election 2024: See Arizona election results | Live coverage on Election Day
The vote count released by Maricopa County includes ballots received by Tuesday, Oct. 29, according to the county. In-person Election Day votes will be posted throughout the evening. Voters were still voting as of 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday night. Polls closed at 7 p.m. in Arizona, but voters who were in line before that time were able to cast their ballots after the deadline.
Arizona is in the center of the presidential action. The battleground state has 11 electoral votes that will play a significant role in determining which candidate wins the White House.
The dramatic battle for the presidency has been marked by chaos and a list of unexpected events.
Only a handful of times in history has a former president lost and sought the White House again, or has a president stepped aside in the middle of his reelection campaign. Plus, presidential candidates running with a felony conviction are a rarity in U.S. history.
The race is a dead heat in Arizona, according to the latest public polls. Trump narrowly led Harris but the numbers were so close that either candidate had a real shot at winning the Grand Canyon State.
Voter frustrations with the economy and immigration are fueling Trump’s slight advantage among Arizona voters. The former president has struck a confident tone during recent Arizona rallies, even musing on stage in Prescott Valley that he should be in the all-important swing state of Pennsylvania instead.
“We’re going to win Arizona,” Trump said at an October rally in Tempe, noting that he’s pleased with the early vote numbers. “We’re going to defeat Kamala Harris.”
Harris is not far behind, though. She’s strongest on the issues of democracy and reproductive rights, and her campaign is banking on a massive ground game operation to put her over the top in a state where Democrats have made major gains during the Trump era.
“This will be a very tight race until the very end. And we are the underdog,” Harris told a rally crowd in Phoenix last month.
The battle for the White House was shaping up to be a 2020 rematch between Trump and President Joe Biden, but it changed dramatically at the end of June when Biden’s disastrous debate performance against Trump sent Democrats into a panic. The president was pushed out by his own party in a matter of weeks. He dropped his reelection bid in July, well after the primary election was over.
That same month, Trump was nearly killed on live television when a gunman opened fire during the former president’s campaign rally in Pennsylvania. A bullet struck his ear, leaving Trump bloodied but otherwise unharmed as Secret Service agents rushed him off the stage. He’d be the target of another failed assassination attempt in September.
Harris stepped up to take Biden’s place just weeks before the Democratic National Convention, holding off the high-profile members of her party with their own presidential ambitions and the possibility of an open convention. Harris had only three months to put together a presidential campaign in her new role as the nominee. She inherited Biden’s campaign operations across the country, including in Arizona, which had been laying general election groundwork since February.
This story will be updated as election results are reported.
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Publish date : 2024-11-05 23:16:00
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