The four governmental states of Arizona

Seventh in a series on swing states. How did the house of Barry Goldwater turned into a swing state? If it moves from red to blue this year, the query -- maybe not hard to answer -- may be why it didn't flip earlier. One in 4 Republicans are non-White, an electorate that is heavily Democratic Party, along with a slim majority of voters wer

Every other nation using that profile, every other nation with rapid urban growth, has been moving briskly toward Democrats since 2016. By nominating Arizona's senior senator for president in 2008, and by picking the first-ever Mormon nominee in 2012, Republicans ran stronger here in different nations with similar Latino populations and similar urban-rural splits.

"If the Democratic Party is performing well in highly educated, urbanized, suburbanized places, we're doing well in Arizona -- it is 80 percent urban and suburban, and the exact same time, we have an increasing young Latino community that is voting Democratic. Only one of these would make the nation competitive, but you add them together and we are seeing a surge."

On paper, Republicans can win the presidency without Arizona, but they never have before. The arrival of air conditioning transformed Arizona from a collection of little cities and sprawling Native American reserve into a beacon for people -- frequently retirees -- fleeing the Midwest. One in 11 Arizonans are military veterans, and for quite a while, the suburbs blossoming across Maricopa County gave the GOP an unbeatable advantage in elections.

Consistently conservative, Arizona's Republicans moved farther to the appropriate since 2008 -- and it's cost them. The 2010 passage of S.B. 1070, one of the country's strictest anti-immigration legislation, won votes initially but galvanized the left and the Latino vote.

However, the conservatives were dropping, also, with Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio ousted by voters in 2016 and Republicans ceding that a Senate seat along with the secretary of state's office at 2018. The nation's GOP seat, Kelli Ward, made her name for a fringe Senate candidate ("Chemtrail Kelli"). Along with the state's Republican legislative majority is seen as vulnerable, both due to the parties' changes and because of voter unhappiness with the way Gov. Doug Ducey (R) responded to the coronavirus.

The president has a dedicated base in Arizona and made one of his very first campaign stops here, alongside Arpaio, when some press outlets failed to take him seriously. Immigration, that has often reshaped politics at the nation, has been subsumed by other issues that this season, and one Democratic wager is that Trump, who pardoned Arpaio at 2017, has taken the wrong side of the state's culture wars.

Democrats look fondly at Arizona for quite a 2020 reason: Like Florida, it has a strong early-voting tradition and allows votes to be counted before Election Day. Though it's one of the last states to close polls Nov. 3, Arizona, like Florida, could offer the initial clues to the way the election is moving, as election officials rely early votes before Election Day starts. Plus it could tell us whether vote patterns are looking more like 2016, when Republicans held enough suburban voters to win, or 2018, when they did not.

To understand Arizona, we have divided it into four governmental "states" The biggest by far is Phoenix, or Maricopa County, which means a lot of the state's vote that a win there usually ends the race. The Tucson region is and has been a stronghold for Democrats, even when they shed statewide. The Red West is the most Republican part of the country; the Red East has large pockets of Democrats, but it's more of the conservative voters that the president should win.

This is the seventh in a series breaking down the key swing states of 2020, revealing how electoral trends played out within the previous few years and in which the shift in votes really mattered.