President-elect Donald Trump took the battleground state of Arizona, further deepening his Electoral College victory with a final tally of 312 votes for Trump to Vice President Kamala Harris’s 226 votes.
With the Grand Canyon State win, Trump secured all seven swing states—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—a stark improvement from his run in 2020. During that election, then-Democratic candidate Joe Biden picked up six out of the seven, with Trump only taking North Carolina.
The fight for those coveted battleground electoral college votes and the strategy of how to claim them dominated much of both Harris’s and Trump’s runs.
While the state is still reaching its final totals in Arizona, voters appeared to split their votes between President, Senate, and ballot initiatives. The state went red for Trump, passed Proposition 139—the abortion ballot initiative that ensures access until around 24 weeks or later for the mental or physical health of the pregnant person—and is poised to elect Democrat Ruben Gallego over Trump surrogate Kari Lake.
“Trump’s win in Arizona also marks a transformation of the GOP in the state from being the home of Republican establishment figures like the late Sen. John McCain to the cradle of Trump’s MAGA movement,” Politico’s Meridith McGraw wrote. President Biden was the first Democrat to win the state since Bill Clinton in 1996. And Trump, who currently has 53% of the vote in Arizona, took it back.
The GOP also won big in the Senate this cycle—picking up three seats so far and entering into 2025 with at least 52 Republican senators.
Democrats’ last chance at thwarting a Republican presidency, Senate, and House of Representatives depends on the remaining 17 House races, most of which are “in competitive districts in Western states where the pace of vote counting is typically slower than in the rest of the country,” according to Reuters.
If Republicans lead in the White House and both chambers of Congress, they could have immense leeway to enact elements of Project 2025, the GOP playbook for what Trump’s presidency ought to look like.
“Project 2025,” per the New York Times, “lays out plans for criminalizing pornography, disbanding the Commerce and Education departments, rejecting the idea of abortion as health care and shredding climate protections.” It also “calls out the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which includes the National Weather Service, as ‘one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry.’ And it backs deploying the military ‘to assist in arrest operations’ along the U.S.-Mexico border.”
Trump has denied a connection to the controversial policy project, despite much of the plan being driven by people who previously served as his advisers and would likely hold significant roles in the next administration. Early Wednesday morning, as the former president approached victory, one of the first groups to congratulate him was the Heritage Foundation, which spearheaded Project 2025.
“The entire conservative movement stands united behind him,” Kevin Roberts, the foundation’s president, said in a statement, noting, “as he prepares to secure our wide-open border, restore the rule of law, put parents back in charge of their children’s education, restore America to its proper place as a leader in manufacturing, put families and children first, and dismantle the deep state.”
