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Arizona has not elected a Democrat since Bill Clinton’s second victory in 1996, but it is experiencing major demographic changes.
PHOENIX – Josh Heaton “immediately” regretted voting for Donald Trump in 2016. The longtime Republican intends to make amends by supporting Joe Biden next month on the battlefield of Arizona.
Moderate conservatives like Heaton, who are switching sides in the southwestern state, where Trump won by about 100,000 votes last time but Biden now leads by a small margin, could prove vital to the US election, analysts say.
“We didn’t feel like we had very good options” in 2016, the 43-year-old engineer told AFP at his home in suburban Phoenix.
“To be honest, until I voted I didn’t know who I was going to vote for. And I regret something immediately after,” he added.
Heaton, who defines himself as “a person of values, a religious person, a conservative person,” expected Trump “to become more presidential” by winning.
“But that was not the case,” added Heaton, who criticizes Trump’s handling of the pandemic, his free-spending fiscal policy and especially his “narcissism” and “perpetual lies.”
Arizona has not elected a Democrat since Bill Clinton’s second victory in 1996, but it is experiencing major demographic changes.
The state best known abroad for the Grand Canyon is experiencing rapid growth in urban areas, among young, college-educated voters and in its robust Latino community, groups that tend to favor the Democratic Party.
But the key to next month’s election is that the average Arizona voter, whether Republican or Democratic, tends to be more moderate and is “tired of the president’s behavior and campaign rhetoric,” according to the politics professor. from Arizona State University, Gina Woodall.
Both campaigns have invested huge sums of campaign money in the swing state, and Trump visited Monday for his second rally of the month so far.
“I think President Trump has a lot more to lose” in Arizona, Woodall said.
“If they lose Arizona, that makes it much more difficult … to get the 270” electoral college votes required for the presidency, he added.
Silent Majority?
Arizona’s seven million people control 11 polling place votes.
As in many states, voters began casting their options weeks before November 3, the official election date.
While some have used voting by mail, a method that has been repeatedly attacked by the Trump campaign, many have chosen to cast their first votes in person at the already open polls.
Kathleen McGovern, 71, a lifelong Democrat holding the green envelope containing her ballot for Biden, told AFP it “looks like Election Day already.”
“Many of my friends are Republicans, and several of them have confided to me that … they are changing their vote” for this election, he said.
“Some of them are afraid to say it out loud,” McGovern added.
Until recently, Heaton was also quiet, initially assuming that repentant former Trump voters like him were in the minority.
“I was surprised to learn that there were more of us, because we were a bit silent … I don’t know … we could even be the majority.”
Now on the front of his house, next to the Halloween decorations, are two signs that say “Unity over division” and “Arizona Republicans for Biden.”
The latter is a group for which Heaton and his wife Emily campaign on the sidewalks of major roads.
Passing cars and pickup trucks honk in both support and rejection, and Trump supporters frequently boo and brandish their own banners or campaign flags alongside U.S. national flags.
‘Great victory’
Arizona has more registered Republicans than Democrats, and its independents traditionally tend to vote in the red.
But Biden’s local campaign is “more effectively targeting its messages to align with moderate voters in the state,” said University of Arizona associate professor of politics Samara Klar.
For Woodall, Arizona’s election will come down to “a referendum on the president, on his behavior, on his policies,” particularly in regards to the pandemic, which hit the state hard this summer.
Heaton condemns the Trump movement as a “cult of lack of empathy” and sees Biden as a “more central” Democratic candidate who “would make a good president.”
He hopes to vote for Republicans again one day, but he doesn’t know when.
For now, he just hopes that a “great victory for the Democrats” spells the end of the Trump administration.
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