As of Saturday, it appeared that about 100,000 voters in Phoenix’s Maricopa County alone, which makes up about half the state’s population, voted for Biden and Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Mark Kelly but chose all Republicans for a host of other state offices, said Garrett Archer, the former chief data analyst for the Arizona Secretary of State.
“Generic Republicans down-ballot are winning,” he said, including in the state legislature, which was widely predicted to flip into Democratic hands for the first time in more than 50 years but will keep its GOP majority. That suggests many reliably Republican voters had a special animus toward Trump and Sen. Martha McSally, who was banking on her reflexive loyalty to Trump to carry her over the threshold…
Former McCain staffers, including Woods, actively encouraged Arizona’s Republicans to come out in public support of Biden, not just on account of Trump’s poor treatment of McCain but because they believed the former senator would have voted his conscience for Biden, too…
For many of the “McCainites,” as he called them, Cindy McCain’s moving appearance at the Democratic National Convention was the green light to reject the president. There, she spoke of her husband’s friendship with Biden dating to the ’70s when McCain was the Navy’s liaison to the U.S. Senate.
