Battleground America: How the West might be won in Arizona?
Arizona is one of the decisive swings states in the upcoming election, and Donald Trump is currently ahead in the polls as ITV News Correspondent Dan Rivers reports.
ITV News' Battleground America series focuses on the people, places and policies that will pick the next president in the 2024 election.
Arizona may look familiar to some of you. It is the quintessential Wild West backdrop to countless Westerns. The desert, cacti and cliffs are unlike anything we have in the UK.
In November this state may also play a role as monumental as its landscape, being one of the key battleground states which will help decide the election shootout between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.
The population is finely divided between the two candidates. The latest polling has Trump and Harris in a dead heat; appropriate perhaps in a state where the temperature was above 100 degrees Fahrenheit (37.7C) for more than 100 days this summer.
In 2020, Joe Biden won here by just over ten thousand votes. Abortion, immigration and the economy are the issues which will dominate. Arizona’s state legislature already introduced a 16-week limit to terminations in the wake of the so-called Dobbs decision which overturned the Federal right to an abortion.
In under two months, Arizonans won’t just be voting for the politicians of their choice; they will also decide whether to lift that abortion restriction, under what’s called Proposal 139. This isn’t just a theoretical debate about Trump and Harris’s policy position - abortion is literally on the ballot in November.
We filmed in a clinic in Phoenix as Mariah sought a termination. It was the last day she could legally go through with the procedure, as she was 15 weeks and six days pregnant.
She says she had been raped by her boyfriend, the father of her child, a few days before, when he “snapped” and came to the rapid realisation she needed to leave him for her safety.
Mariah described how she was strangled and passed out during the attack. “I didn’t want to give birth to the baby of a monster that almost killed me,” she said.
She added: “These politicians, they don't know….And that's why I think it's best that we leave those (decisions) to the victim's choice. In my humble opinion, if you don't have a uterus, you have no opinion.”
The nurses and doctors who deal with the women seeking abortion here are worried that if Donald Trump is elected, a nationwide ban on any abortion may be introduced.
Trump has claimed it would never get to that point because he has delegated the issue to the States to decide. When pressed, though, he wouldn’t say whether he would veto or sign such a measure into law.
Dr. Gabrielle Goodrich runs the clinic and is blunt in her assessment. If an abortion ban is introduced, she says women “would go underground, self-manage abortion or go abroad…poor minority women would be trapped and suffering consequences and women would die”.
While Arizonans will have a chance to have a direct vote on abortion, on other issues in November they will have to assess the merits of the politicians.
Immigration has been used repeatedly by the Republicans to attack the track record of Kamala Harris. It resonates here in Arizona which shares a long border with Mexico.
Donald Trump accuses her of allowing millions of undocumented migrants to cross into the United States. The reality of course is more complex. Kamala Harris had limited power as Vice President over the border.
She was indeed tasked with liaising with the so-called 'northern triangle’ of Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador to tackle some of the root causes of migration, but it is inaccurate to say she was Joe Biden’s border tsar. But that hasn’t stopped a lot of Arizonans from mistrusting Harris on immigration.
Tanner Bryson runs a horse riding ranch where he grew up out in the Arizonan desert and says he notices the increase in crime and social issues which he blames on illegal migrants.
As we ride up a rock-strewn hill he tells me why he will vote for Donald Trump in November.
“In America right now that is the biggest problem we are facing: illegals coming into our country. They are not vetted…I feel Trump is the best chance to secure our border and take back the ground that has been given away,” he says.
I ask if he believes Kamala Harris when she says she is going to help secure the southern border.
“I absolutely think that is false. I think that is a soundbite to get her elected,” Mr Bryson replies.
A quarter of the electorate in Arizona is Latino and while most have traditionally backed Democrats, Donald Trump is drawing away some of that support.
Jesse Romero is an activist who has written books about why Catholics should vote for Trump. He is evangelical about the former president.
“The reason more and more people are breaking for Trump is we were better off as Hispanics and Catholics under Trump’s administration than we were for the last three and a half years under the Biden-Harris administration,” he says.
When I ask incredulously if he is suggesting Trump is more Catholic-friendly than Biden who is a practising Catholic, he is adamant.
“Hands down! Absolutely!”, he exclaims, as if the three-times married, election-denying, convicted felon, who’s been found liable for sexual assault was a paragon of saintly virtue.
This is the magic trick which Donald Trump is trying to pull off in places like Arizona. Despite Biden accusing him of having the morals of an alley cat, Trump is still trying to convince the devout and socially conservative that he represents them.
It’s a counterintuitive strategy, but one that appears to be keeping Arizona in play for Trump as the clock counts down to election day.
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