NEW RIVER, AZ — Donald Trump has a math advantage in Arizona. Kamala Harris has 76-year-old Mardi Devolites.
Late last week, in a vintage forest green Jeep Grand Wagoneer, Devolites and a crew of like-minded and similarly aged women snaked through the rural Arizona tumbleweeds and dirt roads. Following an app, they drove around for two hours to find high-propensity independent and Republican voters who they hoped would cross party lines to beat the math.
“Hi, I’m Mardi, and I’m your neighbor,” she said with a smile and a cowboy hat to protect herself from the 105-degree fall day. “Do you know the candidates running for election this year?” A horse trainer by day, Devolites has started her own ragtag band of liberal-leaning volunteers to canvass rural New River, about 40 miles north of Phoenix. It’s a place where you’re greeted by a “fuck Nancy Pelosi” sign as you wind up Circle Mountain Road, no dueling Harris-Walz sign in sight.
“We don’t go to the houses that have Trump signs, it’s just pointless,” Devolites said, passing by one.
When they approach voters, they don’t start by talking about the vice president — a surefire way to turn people off, they say — but instead about down-ballot candidates and issues. Their group is not sanctioned by the local state Democratic Party, and the materials they pass out don’t have a handout from the Harris-Walz campaign.
“The Democratic Party doesn’t care about rural voters,” Devolites said to NOTUS while wearing a bright green “gun rights is brat” bracelet. Almost punctuating her point, the owner of the first house on the list — a mobile home on a concrete foundation on a gravel road — said, “Nobody ever comes here.”
Devolites is under the helm of Indivisible, a national progressive organizing group. And she is one of thousands of canvassers across Arizona, putting sweat equity into reaching voters far outside the traditional Democratic Party.
At another of the 14 houses she stopped by on Thursday, a woman with bright red hair exited her pueblo-style home blanketed by saguaro cacti and grabbed a packet of candidate information that prominently featured a warning about Project 2025. “Don’t worry,” she said quickly. “There are two Democrats and two Republicans in here, and we’re all voting for Harris.” She added that her MAGA neighbor across the street said he would move to Portugal if Harris won, giving them even more of an incentive.
In Arizona, reaching across the aisle is not merely an exercise in virtue but a necessity. Since 2020, Democrats have lost nearly 100,000 voters registered to their party. According to data compiled by Arizona-based strategist Stacy Pearson from state registration reports, Republicans now have more than 250,000 more registered voters than Democrats. And independents now have more than 100,000 more registered voters than Democrats, a shift from 2020 when Democrats surpassed indies by 20,000.
With hundreds of voters moving into Arizona by the day — most registering as independents, giving them the option of voting in either party primary — Harris now has a problem Biden didn’t have when he won.
“The enthusiasm is as high as it could possibly be for Harris, but there is a numbers problem in Arizona,” Pearson said. “There is just a mathematical complication in Arizona that other states don’t have. None of the other swing states have lost Dems the way Arizona has.”
NOTUS spoke to more than a dozen people involved in the race — ranging from Harris staffers and surrogates to Republicans backing Harris to state Democrats and donors — and the vibe on the ground is hopeful, but not optimistic.
“If you would rank the seven battleground states, people think it’s the least likely she wins, which is surprising considering the confidence when she first replaced Biden,” a Democratic operative close to the vice president said about national campaign sentiment.
Harris, who routinely calls herself the underdog in the race, will take her ninth trip to the state since 2021 on Friday, a clear indication that the campaign believes the state is still in play — something campaign aides had almost written off when Biden was still on top of the ticket, multiple people close to the campaign told NOTUS. Before she arrives, both her husband, Doug Emhoff, and her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz, will have spent a day there this week.
“As early voting kicks off this week, our campaign is highlighting to voters the choice,” between Harris and Trump, said Jaelin O’Halloran, Harris’ Arizona press secretary. “We have the operation to win, and are engaging voters that will decide this election and deliver Arizona for Vice President Harris and Governor Tim Walz.”
The campaign pointed to the success Democrats had in Arizona in 2022, electing a Democratic governor, senator, attorney general and secretary of state, due to major investments from the Democratic National Committee.
While Democrats in the campaign and those aligned with Harris privately contend that she doesn’t necessarily need Arizona to beat former President Trump to 270 electoral votes, the campaign is pouring in money and time nonetheless, trying to keep open as many paths to the White House as possible.
“Arizona is obviously traditionally Republican. And I think anytime somebody chooses their team, they don’t want to stray away from their team,” said Stephanie Grisham, the former Trump communications director turned critic after Jan. 6 and now a surrogate for the vice president. In an interview with NOTUS in Phoenix, she described the outreach to Republicans in the state as an “uphill climb.” Grisham — like other Harris supporters — said the difference will be made person-by-person. And she predicted that a silent wave of Republican voters will put Harris over the top — akin to Trump’s countrywide win in 2016.
“The ground game that the Harris campaign has had is something I’ve never seen before,” she said.
The Harris campaign has 19 offices in Arizona, with almost 200 full-time staffers, the Arizona shop told NOTUS. And since late July, more than 70,000 volunteers have signed up. They’ve focused on less traditional campaign events and instead tried to immerse themselves in community, local operatives say, like hosting a lowrider car event or a block party with popular Black celebrities and politicians.
Greg Whitten, former President Barack Obama’s 2008 political director in the state who is now running for Congress against an election denier, said the Harris team is reaching further out into Arizona than he’s seen before from other campaigns. That’s particularly true in the West Valley, Sun City and Mesa, he said, where the campaign has opened up coordinated offices.
“I think there’s a lot of excitement in going to places that normally Democratic presidential candidates wouldn’t go, which is going to help.”
Another place the campaign is hoping will bear fruit is abortion, as Arizona is one of nearly a dozen states that have reproductive rights initiatives on the ballot, which could bring young voters and women out in droves. The Arizona shop has focused heavily, they say, on outreach to Native American communities, which make up a sizable portion of the rural outreach, that they believe could make a huge wave come November. In Arizona, Native Americans make up 5% of the voting electorate.
And maybe most importantly, the local Republican Party has been virtually taken over by far-right groups like Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA — who have pushed who can win primaries in Arizona so far to the right that moderate Republicans vying for their party’s nominations were almost entirely shut out earlier this year. The shift has moved some Republicans raised in the image of the late Sen. John McCain to reject their extremism.
The Harris campaign has at least some reason to think Arizona Republicans could be ripe for them. Biden won the state by just 10,000 votes in 2020, and earlier this year, more than 140,000 Republicans voted for Nikki Haley during the state’s primary, even though she had already formally exited the race.
Looking to profit from that energy, the Harris campaign in Arizona has launched a Latter-day Saints for Harris-Walz Advisory Committee and a Republicans for Harris advisory committee — and there’s a matching PAC for the latter that supports billboards and TV ads across the state. And she’s amassed a cohort of Republican endorsements in the state that carry weight, including former Sen. Jeff Flake; Jimmy McCain, the son of the late senator; Mesa Mayor John Giles; and Mesa City Councilmember Julie Spilsbury.
“When I have conversations with them, we start with the premise of ‘Donald Trump is horrible,’” Giles said in an interview with NOTUS at Mesa City Hall. But Giles said, despite the Republican validators, individual voters still have guilt about voting for Democrats, though he believes Harris will legislate as a moderate if elected. “So that’s the challenge that people like me have, is letting people know that, yes, this is an extraordinary election. Donald Trump is an extraordinarily bad candidate. It is appropriate for you to, as a lifelong Republican, not vote Republican this time. And it’s not good enough to just leave it blank.”
The Harris campaign is still trailing the former president in recent state polls, though within the margin of error. The economy and immigration rank as the two highest issues to Arizonans in most surveys, the issues in which Harris tends to do worse with voters than Trump.
Asked if Harris would win Arizona if the election were held the next day, Giles said, “Probably not.”
“I mean, the answer is, nobody knows the answer to that question. I think the thing that scares me is — I’ll put money on her winning the popular vote for the United States. That’s going to happen. But she might, you know, join the Hillary Clinton-Al Gore club.”
Maybe more striking is the multiple polls, like one from New York Times/Siena College, with Harris down double digits compared to Ruben Gallego, the Arizona congressman running to replace Sen. Kyrsten Sinema and against election denier Kari Lake.
Those numbers have stoked chatter about undervotes at the top of the ballot, where people fear those in the “mushy middle” might not cast a vote for Harris or Trump — or split the ticket between Trump and Gallego.
Asked about the gap, Gallego credited it to time and name ID statewide.
“I wish the polling was correct. We’re not doing as well. We are in the lead in our internal polls,” said Gallego, describing the ballot-up state. “Traditionally, in Arizona, the Arizona candidate will always outperform the top of the ticket. And again, it’s because we’re a western state. People are familiar with us. You know, a lot of people that are going to vote for me, know me and have known me for almost 20 years.”
In his Senate race in 2020, Mark Kelly — another familiar Arizonan — outpaced Joe Biden by more than 175,000 votes.
While Gallego predicted Harris would win Arizona, he added, “It’s not fair to compare it to me because I have 20 years of Arizona experience.”
Others say the split is due to Harris’ poor performance among Latino votes, particularly with Latino men. A USA Today/Suffolk University poll released Monday found that 51% of Latino men under 34 support Trump, compared to 39% for Harris. And among Latino men 35-49, that spread widened to 57% supporting the former president to 37% for the vice president.
“Harris is doing an effective job of reaching out to Republicans for sure,” said Barrett Marson, an Arizona-based Republican strategist. “However, I’m not sure that she is investing the same energy into courting Latino men. And that could make all the difference.”
The campaign pointed to the gains made in outreach to Latinos in 2022 and ratcheted up since, including identifying voters who would prefer to be reached in Spanish. The campaign has held Spanish language phone banking and canvassing and launched targeted ads during events with high Latino viewership since Harris replaced Biden.
Getting people to cross party lines is a gargantuan task for a truncated and polarized election, especially in a state where a palpable sense of fear around politics has taken hold — fortified, some who spoke with NOTUS believe, by the outsized role religion has in Arizona.
“Everyone wants to belong, that’s just one of our deepest desires,” said Spilsbury, a lifelong registered Republican and LDS member who gets emotional when describing the backlash she’s faced inside her party and church for speaking out against Trump and working to elect Harris. “And the second you do something like this, you don’t belong anymore.”
Joel John, a former Arizona state representative, lifelong Republican and Mormon, said he voted for Trump in 2020 for that very reason, but now he regrets it and instead has become a surrogate for the vice president — and he has received the same backlash.
“People reached out to me privately and told me that they appreciate my stance and courage, and they supported that they agree with my stance,” he said. “They’d rather keep that to themselves for fear of backlash, but I learned I’m not alone in my community. Maybe outnumbered, I don’t know, but certainly not alone.”
And Wes Gullett, a former McCain staffer a part of the Harris GOP advisory group, told NOTUS, “I’ve got a Harris-Walz bumper sticker on my car, and I get tailgated by big, giant pickup trucks all the time.”
Fear of talking about politics comes in different forms across the state. Canvassers from Care in Action, a nonprofit group focused on canvassing low-propensity working-class Latino women registered as independents and Democrats, spanned out across northern and southern Tucson, near the U.S.-Mexico border where immigration politics are an everyday way of life and fear of deportation is palpable.
Some of the canvassers are children of domestic workers. They focus on issues like paid leave, health care and childcare. Since starting in late August, they’ve already hit over 2,000 doors in Tucson. And they’ve spoken to or canvassed more than a thousand. On foot, the group of a dozen or so mostly Latino men and women canvassers face tough scenarios, one even said they’ve had a gun pulled on them, as Arizona is both a right-to-carry and stand-your-ground state.
They’ve had doors slammed in their faces and had people yell expletives about the vice president. Most of their interactions tend to be quick, the group told NOTUS during their team debrief last week. But they’ve also held thoughtful discussions on health care, the fear associated with migration status and the state of politics.
And they’ve found people who otherwise were not planning to vote — or certainly weren’t planning to vote for Harris — receptive to changing their mind when presented with contact and information.
Earlier in the week, in northern Tucson, Luz Acosta, a paid canvasser, approached a Latina woman returning to her home with her husband in tow — a typical way to greet people in the area as they canvass in the afternoon. With her pamphlets in hand, she went through the four listed issues regarding health care. Quickly, the woman cut her off.
“I’m voting for Harris,” Luz recounted the woman saying politely. “But I don’t want my husband to know, so can you please leave.”
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Jasmine Wright is a reporter at NOTUS.