Joe Biden is the projected winner in the state of Arizona, flipping the state blue for the second time in 70 years.
CNN reports: “Biden is just the second Democrat to win Arizona since 1948, when Harry Truman won. Bill Clinton narrowly won the state in 1996, but Arizona moved further right in the next two decades, electing hard-line immigration proponents like Gov. Jan Brewer and Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio and passing laws like SB 1070, a controversial state law that required officers to make immigration checks while enforcing other laws if ‘reasonable suspicion’ of illegal immigration exists.”
It all came down to Maricopa County.
Mother Jones reports: “As of Thursday, Biden had a roughly 12,000-vote lead in Arizona, thanks in large part to his 45,000-vote advantage in Maricopa County. These margins can largely be attributed to the work of the Latinx organizers I first wrote about in September, who ran countless voter registration events, information campaigns, and GOTV efforts to push for candidates and propositions that support their communities. Leading up to Election Day, a collective of local groups knocked on more than 1 million doors and made almost 8 million phone calls focused on Latino, Black, and Native American voters. The result was high turnout from those communities, with more than 70 percent of Latinos—who make up about a quarter of the total electorate in Arizona—supporting Biden. That turnout was crucial in Maricopa, a diverse county of about 4.5 million people that includes Phoenix and the many suburbs that surround it.”
