2024 United States presidential election in Arizona (Blackford)

The **2024 United States presidential election in Arizona** was held on Tuesday, November 5, 2024, as part of the 2024 United States presidential election in which all 50 states plus the District of Columbia participated. At the time of the 2024 election, Arizona had 11 votes in the Electoral College, and the election pitted incumbent Democratic President Joe Biden against Republican challenger and Governor of Florida Ron DeSantis. Historically, Arizona had been a Republican stronghold for much of the past 70 years, having gone Republican in every presidential election from 1952 to 2016 with the sole exception of 1996, when it narrowly backed Democratic incumbent Bill Clinton in a bitterly contested three-way race. As a testament to the state's strong Republican tilt, it had been the only outside of the Deep South to back Republican native son Barry Goldwater in the 1964 election.

However, the state's Republican lean would begin to dwindle in the 2010s with the increasing diversification and leftward shift of Maricopa County, which made up over 60% of the state's population, and the state voted for Biden by a very narrow margin in 2020 in what became one of the most bitterly contested state-level presidential elections in the country's history, leading to several years of electoral audits and recounts. The state's leftward shift was further signified by gains by the Arizona Democratic Party in the 2022 midterms, and the state was expected to be a crucial swing state going into the 2024 presidential election. Though DeSantis had initially seen a considerable lead over Biden in the state in hypothetical opinion polling, his lead dwindled substantially in the weeks after he gained the Republican nomination, with the Democratic Party considering Arizona to be its top target in the 2024 elections, and Biden soon developed a comfortable lead over DeSantis in opinion polling in the state. By the day of the election, most news organizations considered Arizona to be leaning Democratic, and analysts had labeled the state as the most important in the entire country in that cycle.

On Election Day, Arizona was extremely close, with the initial vote count showing DeSantis narrowly edging out a victory over Biden in the state by less than a thousand votes, making it the closest state in the nation. The Biden campaign disputed the state's results, with widespread reports of voter intimidation from far-right militias and alleged attempts to undermine the state's election by Republican operatives. Both candidates claimed victory in the state, whose electors would've been enough to push either candidate over the 270 electoral votes needed to be elected. Over the next several months, numerous audits and recounts took place, leading to the state legislature refusing to send its electors to the Electoral College until a clear winner emerged. Due to this, neither candidate was able to claim the 270 electoral votes needed to be elected president, leading to House Speaker Kevin McCarthy becoming president after Biden's term expired on January 20.

Though the Arizona State Legislature had voted to start yet another recount in mid February, the United States Supreme Court issued a injunction against the recount on February 26, leaving DeSantis with a 1,155 vote lead in the state and giving him the 270 electoral votes needed to be elected president. The election was considered among the most controversial in history, and the Supreme Court's ruling giving the state to DeSantis has frequently been ranked among the worst rulings by the Supreme Court in United States history, with critics accusing the conservatives of the court of favoring DeSantis for his party affiliation and throwing out substantial evidence of voter tampering, fraud and intimidation that would've otherwise made the election results null.