Vice President Kamala Harris in Flagstaff to target demographics key to reelection effort
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Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday will visit Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, the last stop in her monthlong “Fight for Our Freedoms” tour of colleges and universities across the country.
The vice president’s tour has been geared towards demographics that contributed to her and President Joe Biden’s victory in 2020, chiefly young voters who are Black or Latino.
Those are important demographics for Biden's re-election. In recent years, college towns have helped deliver greater Democratic margins in some swing states, including Arizona. Many Democrats see an opportunity in Arizona’s burgeoning voting-age Latino population, a demographic that reliably leans blue.
In 2020, Biden squeaked out a victory in Arizona by a margin of just 0.3%, only the second time the state has voted for a Democrat since 1952.
“Arizona is a swing state. We are in play next year,” said Sam Almy, a Democratic data analyst and strategist. “Since 2018, the top of the ticket race has been within 2 or 3 percent of each other.”
Biden himself has visited Arizona twice this summer: first in August to designate a national monument on tribal lands near the Grand Canyon, and next in September to announce a new library in honor of the late Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.
Biden and Harris are working to win Arizona's Latino voters
A White House news release about Tuesday’s event notes that NAU is one of Arizona’s 21 Hispanic-serving institutions or colleges with 25% or greater Hispanic enrollment.
Arizona’s Latino voters are a reliably Democratic voting bloc, with nearly 60% choosing Biden over former President Donald Trump in 2020, according to an AP Votecast survey. But they consistently turn out to vote at lower rates than the general public.
Stephen Nuño-Pérez, a NAU professor and Democratic political consultant whose firm works on Latino voter outreach for the Biden re-election campaign, noted that Arizona’s Latino demographic is significantly younger than average: its median age is around 28 years old, compared to a statewide median of 38.
“Kamala is the younger, more spry of the two, and probably trying to connect with this younger crowd,” he said.
According to a campaign memo obtained by ABC News, the Biden re-election team views Harris as a strong fundraiser who connects with certain parts of the Democrats’ voting bloc, including non-white voters and low-income Americans.
Latinos also have a higher-than-average workforce participation rate, Nuño-Pérez pointed out. That means that in theory, they should be reaping dividends from the ongoing U.S. construction boom, unique among its economic peers. Treasury Department analyses link that boom to the Biden administration’s investments in domestic manufacturing.
Still, on the whole, Biden appears to remain underwater in the minds of Arizona voters. An agglomeration of polls vetted by the political analysis website FiveThirtyEight shows all recent surveys forecasting a Republican victory in the state, except one finding that the race is dead even.
It’s hard to gauge public sentiment with more than a year until the election. But it’s safe to say that there have been “concerning data points,” Nuño-Pérez said, and Biden is “not as popular as people would like him to be.”
Harris is visiting Flagstaff, a sympathetic stronghold
Coconino County, the deep-blue stronghold home to Flagstaff, isn’t the best place to visit if Harris wants to target swing voters. Biden carried the county with 60% of the vote in 2020, and in Flagstaff itself, Democrats outnumber Republicans two-to-one.
From a strategy perspective, Almy said, the visit likely is more about priming an already-sympathetic audience to register to vote and mobilize ahead of an election that could be decided by just tenths of a percentage point.
“It’s really about engaging with the base, making sure they’re excited about the election, making sure they turn out, making sure they get their ballots early, making it easier to vote for students,” he said.
Harris’ choice of the Flagstaff-based campus over the other Hispanic-serving institutions in Arizona — such as the Tempe-based Arizona State University or the Tucson-based University of Arizona — could mark an attempt to connect with voters outside the Democratic Party’s traditional urban base, Almy said.
“I think it speaks to the Democrats realizing that they have a little bit of a problem with rural areas, and want to reconnect with them,” he said. “I’m curious to see where else some of these big candidates are going to come over the next year or so.”
According to a White House statement, the event will be a moderated discussion centered around "key issues that disproportionately impact young people across the country," including abortion, guns, climate change, voting rights, LGBTQ+ issues, mental health and book bans.
Laura Gersony is a national politics reporter for The Arizona Republic and azcentral.com. Follow her on X, formerly known as Twitter, at @lauragersony.
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: VP Harris to visit Flagstaff, targeting key voting demographics
