Arizona voters decided on an exhaustive list of representatives, voters and propositions on Tuesday, giving Democrats much-needed wins in ballot measures while falling short of securing the presidency.
Donald Trump won Arizona’s electoral votes on Saturday after appearing to be in the lead for several days, according to The Associated Press, though the president-elect had enough electoral votes to be elected president regardless of the results. Trump’s victory is owed in part to an increasing support for Republicans among Latino men, who have often consistently supported Democrats.
The extent of his margin was not known for several days. That is because election workers must count each individual ballot before processing them. And in the state’s largest county, Maricopa, the ballot spread across two pages for the first time since 2006. Officials there said that full tabulation could take 10 to 13 days.
But Vice President Kamala Harris’s loss did not appear to reflect a shift in state politics. In a competitive Senate race, Representative Ruben Gallego, a Democrat, defeated Kari Lake, a Republican, The Associated Press said on Monday night. During her campaign, Lake accused Gallego of supporting Harris and President Biden’s immigration policies.
Gallego, who will be the first Latino senator, represented a decisive victory for progressives who sought to remove Senator Kyrsten Sinema, an independent and former Democrat who often voted against her party, though his margin was significantly smaller than polling had suggested.
Gallego’s campaign was a dramatic departure from his pugnacious tendencies as a five-term congressman, hurling profanities at Republicans on social media. He ran as a tempered and pragmatic moderate against Lake, a fiery and vociferous Trump ally who has shared the former president’s baseless claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election.
“I will accept the results of the election,” Lake said last week, praising the conservative group Turning Point Action for its efforts to prevent apparent voter fraud. “I have had a few concerns, but we’ve done a lot of legwork to prevent any problems.”
But ahead of Gallego’s victory, several of Lake’s supporters cast doubts on the results of the election. “The biggest concern I have is how the no-name Green Party Senate candidate outperformed Jill Stein, the Green Party presidential candidate,” Tyler Bowyer, the chief operating officer of Turning Point Action, said in a post on X that was retweeted by Lake.
Two of the eight Republicans who voted to oust House Speaker Kevin McCarthy last year, Representatives Eli Crane and Andy Biggs, won re-election as they defied McCarthy’s campaign of revenge. Allies of McCarthy supported an unsuccessful primary challenge to Crane, while Biggs ran uncontested in the Republican primary.
Voters passed a ballot measure, Proposition 139, that will establish a “fundamental right” to an abortion in the State Constitution. The fate of abortions in the state was left uncertain after the Arizona Supreme Court upheld an 1864 law that bans nearly all forms of the medical procedure. In May, Arizona lawmakers voted to repeal the ban.
But Republicans secured victories in other areas. In the contentious race for Maricopa County recorder, State Representative Justin Heap, a right-wing candidate who has cast doubt on the results of the 2020 election, defeated Tim Stringham, leveraging a Republican constituency that has been galvanized by claims of voter fraud.
Several tough-on-crime measures passed, including propositions to refund residents on their property taxes if local governments fail to enforce laws associated with curbing homelessness and require life in prison for those convicted of trafficking minors.
