Donald Trump has won the presidential election in Arizona, Associated Press has declared, completing a clean sweep of all seven battleground states and locking in a decisive electoral college victory over the Democratic vice-president, Kamala Harris.
Trump, who had secured the 270 electoral college votes needed to win the White House by early Wednesday, now has what is expected to be a final total of 312 votes to Harris’s 226.
The win returned the state to the Republican column after Joe Biden’s 2020 victory and marked Trump’s second victory in Arizona since 2016. Trump had campaigned on border security and the economy, tying Harris to inflation and record illegal border crossings during Biden’s term in office.
Trump has also won the swing states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina, Wisconsin and Nevada. In 2020, Biden defeated Trump by winning six of the seven swing states – he narrowly lost North Carolina – and won 306 electoral college votes to Trump’s 232.
Trump also won 306 in his 2016 victory over Hillary Clinton.
Associated Press said Trump had won 74.6m votes nationwide, or 50.5%, to Harris’ 70.9m, or 48%.
In the US Senate race in Arizona between the Republican Kari Lake and the Democrat Ruben Gallego, Lake, who always denied that Biden won the White House fairly in 2020, was trailing the Democrat 48.5% to 49.5%, or by about 33,000 votes, as of mid-morning on Saturday.
Other Arizona races remain close, including the sixth congressional district battle between the incumbent Republican, Juan Ciscomani, and his Democratic challenger, Kirsten Engel.
However, Republicans appear close to clinching control of the US House of Representatives, in addition to control of the Senate, which they have already won, meaning they would have sweeping powers to potentially ram through a broad agenda of tax and spending cuts, energy deregulation and border security controls.
Protests against Trump erupted in the US on Saturday as people on both coasts took to the streets in frustration at his re-election. Thousands of people in major cities including New York and Seattle demonstrated against the former president and now president-elect amid his threats against reproductive rights and pledges to carry out mass deportations at the start of his presidency.
Biden and Trump would meet on Wednesday in the Oval Office, the White House announced on Saturday. “At President Biden’s invitation, President Biden and President-elect Trump will meet in the Oval Office on Wednesday,” the press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, said in a statement.
In a sign of Trump’s possible impact on the war in Ukraine, one of his senior advisers said that the incoming US administration’s priority for the country would be achieving peace rather than helping it regain territory captured by Russia in the almost three years of the war. In an interview with the BBC, broadcast on Saturday, Bryan Lanza, who has been a political adviser to Trump since his 2016 presidential campaign, said: “When Zelenskyy says we will only stop this fighting, there will only be peace, once Crimea is returned, we’ve got news for President Zelenskyy: Crimea is gone.”
