President-elect Donald Trump won Arizona, completing a sweep of all seven swing states this election cycle.
The battleground state was called just before 9.30pm on Saturday, making it the last to be called in the 2024 election.
The projected victory is a feather in Trump’s cap as it means he won all seven swing states over Vice President Kamala Harris and flipped the state red after narrowly losing Arizona to Biden in 2020.
Trump’s Arizona victory comes hours after he was determined to have won Nevada, earning him six electoral votes.
Arizona’s 11 electoral votes shifted Trump’s column even further over the 270 threshold, putting the final tally at 312 electoral votes for Trump compared 226 for Harris.
Four years ago Biden won the historically red state by just 10,000 votes. The 2020 Democratic victory marked the second time the state voted blue since 1948.
The incredibly tight margin in 2020 propelled Arizona to become the hotbed of Trump’s election fraud claims that culminated in the January 6 Capitol riot and ultimately a federal criminal case against the former president around his attempts to overturn the election results.
Jack Smith, the special counsel overseeing the federal case, is said to be evaluating how to wind down this case as well as one related to Trump’s handling of classified documents before his inauguration.
Smith will let the court know his plans for the 2020 election case by early December after assessing “this unprecedented circumstance and determine the appropriate course going forward consistent with Department of Justice policy,” he wrote in a November 8 filing. Meanwhile, Trump has vowed mass pardons for those convicted of January 6-related offenses.
On the campaign trail, Trump linked the Biden-Harris administration to inflation and the border crisis in what turned out to be a winning argument for the former president.
As election day crept forward, Harris’ chances of winning came to depend on winning the “blue wall” of Rust Belt battleground states, including Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. But she fell short in all three cases.
