US Election Results: A Closer Look at Arizona

State officials say there are still about 450,000 votes to be counted in Arizona, a western state on the presidential battlefield, where Democrat Joe Biden has a 2.35 percentage point advantage over Republican Donald Trump, an advantage of about 68,000 votes.

Some major networks have called him up for Biden, while others have the state still firmly at stake.

Meanwhile, protests have erupted at vote counting centers in the state as supporters of both candidates clash.

Dozens of armed Donald Trump supporters gathered outside the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office as election staff continued to review ballots without the local sheriff’s deputies posted outside.

The vast majority of ballots still counted are from Maricopa County, the most populous area in the state. The next update from election officials in Arizona is expected around 3pm New Zealand time.

The Trump campaign says it is confident the president will surpass Biden when all the votes in the state are counted.

The AP previously called for the Arizona race for Biden after an analysis of ballots cast statewide found that Trump could not catch up on ballots that remained to be counted, but other networks like CNN still have him in play.

There has been an ongoing fight between the Fox News Decision Desk, which makes the network calls and has called Arizona for Biden, and the Trump campaign, which insists the president will end up winning the state. The decision table does not move.

Increasingly anxious Democrats are watching Arizona. You could see those nerves on MSNBC last night, when left-wing host Rachel Maddow learned the latest vote totals for the state.

“The suspense has been: would this be a pro-Trump group or would it be a pro Biden group? So we just got those new numbers,” analyst Steve Kornacki said of the new data.

“Donald Trump gets about 59 percent of these votes.”

“Oh God. That’s crazy,” Maddow replied.

If he takes Arizona, Biden’s victories in the Great Lakes states leave him at 264, meaning he was a battlefield state away, anyone would, from becoming president-elect.

Trump, with 214 electoral votes, faced a much bigger hurdle. To get to 270, you need to claim the remaining four battlefields: Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia, and Nevada.

Arizona has a long political history of Republican voters. It is the home state of Barry Goldwater, a five-term Conservative senator who was the Republican nominee for president in 1964. John McCain, the party’s 2008 presidential nominee, represented the state in Congress from 1983 until his death in 2018.

But demographic changes, including a rapidly growing Latino population and a boom in new residents, some fleeing the skyrocketing cost of living in neighboring California, have made the state more democrat-friendly.

Many of the gains have been driven by the changing politics of Maricopa County, which is home to Phoenix and its suburbs. Maricopa County accounts for 60 percent of the state’s votes, and Biden leads there by 4.2 percentage points in votes that have already been tabulated.

AP, additional reports news.com.au