(Luis Cornelio, Headline USA) Arizona’s presidential and Senate races have been decided, after more than four days of waiting.
President-elect Donald Trump has won Arizona’s 11 electoral votes, according to the liberal New York Times, bringing his total to 312. He led outgoing Vice President Kamala Harris by 6.2 percentage points.
Trump’s Arizona victory effectively reversed the Grand Canyon State’s temporary shift to Democrats.
In 2020, the state’s electoral votes were certified for Joe Biden. Before that and since 1940, Arizona had voted once for Democrats in 1996, when it went for Bill Clinton.
Arizona was the last battleground state to be called following Trump’s decisive victory in Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
At the same time, Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego is projected to defeat Republican Kari Lake in the Arizona Senate race.
Decision Desk HQ projects Ruben Gallego (D) wins the US Senate election in Arizona.#DecisionMade: 8:57 PM EDT
Follow live results here:https://t.co/Dalbgd1kjG pic.twitter.com/7uYO8QdVjH
— Decision Desk HQ (@DecisionDeskHQ) November 10, 2024
Gallego led by 1.5 percentage points, with 49.7% of the vote to Lake’s 48.2%.
Lake’s defeat comes after narrowly losing the 2022 Arizona gubernatorial race to Gov. Katie Hobbs.
Gallego will replace outgoing Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, who opted not to seek re-election due to dissatisfaction with her party’s radical leftward shift.
Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt shared a screenshot of a CNN projection captioned, “Trump completes battleground sweep.”
🧹🧹🧹 pic.twitter.com/fW7YEAB8Qv
— Karoline Leavitt (@kleavittnh) November 10, 2024
Trump’s victory came four days after polls closed on Nov. 5. Notably, Arizona’s ballot-counting process remains to be the topic of controversy.
Decision Desk HQ’s Michael Pruser called the delays “unacceptable.”
He added, “You can forgive the time it takes to process late-arriving mail, and the ballots dropped off on election day, but at minimum, the early vote and election day vote should not take four days to complete.”
The ballot counting problem in Arizona is mainly due to the legislature updating election laws.
But it's not all on the legislature.
On Tuesday afternoon, @sfalmy noted 2.5 million ballots in the state's hands, the vast majority of which had been pre-processed and ready to be… pic.twitter.com/ZcmWSAIXfY
— Michael Pruser (@MichaelPruser) November 10, 2024
