As presidential campaign heats up, who has the strongest ground game in Arizona so far?

President Joe Biden may be lagging behind his predecessor, Donald Trump, in Arizona polls, but his campaign has taken the lead in getting campaign boots on the ground here.

Over the next year, the parties will spend millions of dollars and thousands of hours chatting up prospective voters, knocking on doors and recruiting volunteers to gin up support for their preferred candidate.

And in Arizona, a state whose most recent presidential election was decided by tenths of one percentage point, a far-reaching and energetic ground operation is seen by both parties as a core part of a competitive campaign.

Ultimately, it’s the candidate that animates a presidential bid, not the field organizers or infrastructure. Still, more field organizing means more face-to-face conversations with potential voters, more efforts to promote campaign messages, and more opportunities to lock in votes from core supporters.

Reaching voters that way can be a crucial part of mobilization, and a part of how a campaign budgets its time and energy, says Paul Bentz, a Republican strategist.

“Ground game is incredibly important to organize and activate your voters, to get them turned out. It allows you to move on to other, lower-efficacy voters that maybe only traditionally participate in a presidential election,” Bentz said.

Democrats’ field operation takes shape

Officially, the Democrats' nomination race began over the weekend, as Biden was expected to coast to victory in the South Carolina primary. But in practice, his campaign has been laying the groundwork for the general election for several months now.

In December, Arizona Democrats opened a field office in Phoenix’s majority-Latino neighborhood of Maryvale. In January, they opened a second office in midtown Phoenix.

That’s on top of Biden’s national paid media blitz which has set records for spending in a non-election year.

His campaign’s operation in Arizona took one step further this week, as Biden’s campaign announced the first three official hires to lead his operation in the Grand Canyon State. Sean McEnerney, a senior adviser to the state party, will be Biden’s campaign manager in Arizona; Roy Herrera, a Democratic elections attorney, will serve as state counsel; and Jen Cox, a top staffer for Sen. Mark Kelly, will join the campaign as a senior adviser.

It’s hard to know who’s ahead this far out from the November election. But surveys suggest Biden’s campaign will be an uphill battle: a cluster of polls has former Trump with an edge over Biden in Arizona, and that nationwide, he is losing ground with Latino voters. Nationwide, Biden trails Trump among Hispanic voters, 39% to 34%, according to a recent USA TODAY/Suffolk University poll. That’s a precipitous decline from 2020, when he trounced Trump among that demographic by a two-to-one margin.

Reaching those voters, such as through the Maryvale office and Spanish-language advertising, has been a focus of Biden’s early operation in Arizona so far.

“Our campaign isn’t asking, but earning the Latino vote by engaging the community earlier and with more resources than ever to underscore the stakes for Latinos in the election and highlight how the president is fighting for them,” said Josh Marcus-Blank, state communications director for the Biden campaign.

Cox, the campaign’s newly hired senior adviser, is betting that support for Biden will tick up as it sinks in with voters that Trump will be the Republican nominee.

“I think as that comes into frame, we’re going to see voters making the same choices that they made in 2018, 2020, and 2022, which is rejecting these Trump politics, and this extreme politics and rhetoric and policy,” she said.

GOP ground game slower to materialize

Compared to the Democrats, the Republican operation has been slower to materialize. The party has not made any announcements regarding field offices in Arizona, confirmed Dajana Zlatičanin, an Arizona GOP spokesperson, who noted that some of that strategy falls to the new party chair, Gina Swoboda.

Bentz said Democrats’ field offices are opening earlier than what is typical for presidential campaigns “so I don’t think anybody’s too behind at this point.”

The GOP’s meager fundraising at the national level likely isn’t helping them get started. The Republican National Committee entered 2024 with one-tenth of the inflation-adjusted dollars it had four years ago, according to a HuffPost analysis.

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Leading up to an election, the RNC often transfers money to the Arizona GOP to help them fund ground outreach operations and more. Last year, transfers were down significantly compared to past presidential cycles. Throughout 2019, the year before the hard-fought 2020 election, federal election records show that the RNC transferred upwards of $500,000 into the Arizona GOP’s account. In 2023, they transferred only $9,000.

The success of Republicans’ ground game could depend on whether the GOP can attract donations, particularly under the leadership of a new party chair, Bentz said.

“What we traditionally saw in the past from the Arizona Republican Party was business-minded chairmen who could be a liaison between business owners, large corporations, and others who are aligned with their causes and candidates, then taking those donations and that support and putting it into field operations,” Bentz said.

The Republican National Committee has made several hires whose work will bear on Arizona, including Matthew Brasseaux, the party’s Western regional director, and Christopher Escobedo, the state director in Arizona.

Trump’s campaign also appears to be slower to take shape. With the GOP nomination contest still ongoing, the campaign has hired Pat Aquilina as its state director in Arizona, and has not publicly announced plans for field offices. Jason Miller, a Trump campaign spokesperson, did not provide any more information about the campaign’s plans in Arizona.

That could soon change now that Trump’s victories in Iowa and New Hampshire have begun to lock in his status as the party’s presumptive nominee. Next up later this month is the South Carolina Republican primary. It's the home state of Trump rival Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor, but Trump has been maintaining a substantial lead in the polls there.

Laura Gersony covers national politics for the Arizona Republic. Contact her at lgersony@gannett.com or 480-372-0389.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Biden vs. Trump: Who has the strongest 2024 ground game in Arizona?