How Biden Can Pull Off the Once-Unthinkable: Win Arizona

With less than two weeks to go before the election, the Mother Jones Podcast takes you to the major 2020 battleground state of Arizona. Turning it blue would be a real game changer for former Vice President Joe Biden's attempt to clinch the presidency and Democratic dreams for retaking the Senate. Once the cradle of Goldwater-style Republicanism, Arizona politics are shifting, due in no small part to its growing Latinx electorate, which increasingly tilts Democratic. The party cannot flip the state in November without strong turnout from Latinos, who make up nearly a quarter of the state’s eligible voters. Hanging in the balance are 11 Electoral College votes and a key race between Republican Sen. Martha McSally and Mark Kelly, the retired astronaut who’s married to former Democratic Rep. Gabby Giffords. As Mother Jones immigration reporter Fernanda Echavarri explains in this episode, if Joe Biden carries the state, he will owe his win to the Latinx organizers and activists who have spent the past decade building networks, not to support the Democratic Party but to protect their own community. Many of the young Latinx organizers trying to get out the vote were galvanized in April 2010, when Republican Gov. Jan Brewer signed one of the nation’s most extreme anti-immigrant bills. SB 1070 required police officers to ask about the citizenship status of anyone they stopped and suspected might be in the country illegally. Thousands of people took to the streets to protest, including young people who walked out of school in huge numbers for weeks. It wasn’t just young adults who were energized and enraged. The children who saw their parents live in fear or lost family members to deportation are now old enough to vote: An estimated 100,000 Latinx potential voters have turned 18 since the 2018 midterms. Now, the forecast models have Biden slightly favored to win, and the former Vice President is ahead four points in the RealClearPolitics average of state polls. Latinx activists might be closer than ever to doing the unthinkable and flipping Arizona—if Democrats don’t take them for granted.