Trump, Harris in agony

Donald Trump and Kamala Harris were neck-and-neck in the first statewide results released shortly after polls closed Tuesday night, making this year’s unprecedented and unpredictable race for the White House too close to call Tuesday night to call.

Trump was narrowly leading, according to incomplete, unofficial results posted by Arizona’s secretary of state at 3 a.m. Wednesday, having widened his lead slightly from earlier in the evening.

At the county level, early results showed Harris narrowly leading Trump in vote-rich Maricopa County shortly after polls closed Tuesday night. About 60% of Arizona voters live in Maricopa County.

Maricopa County’s results represented 1.1 million ballots, representing 43.43% of the county’s 2.5 million voters eligible to vote in the election. The county expects 2.1 million voters to turn out and estimates that 700,000 more ballots need to be cast in the coming days.

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The vote count released by Maricopa County includes ballots the county says were received on Tuesday, Oct. 29. In-person votes on Election Day will be distributed throughout the evening. Voters could still vote from Tuesday evening at 7:30 PM. In Arizona, polls closed at 7 p.m., but voters who were in line before then were able to cast their ballots after the deadline.

Arizona is at the center of presidential action. The battleground state has 11 electoral votes that will play a major role in determining which candidate wins the White House.

The dramatic battle for the presidency was marked by chaos and a series of unexpected events.

Only a handful of times in history has a former president lost and sought the White House again, or a president stepped aside in the middle of his re-election campaign. Furthermore, presidential candidates running for office on a felony count are a rarity in American history.

According to the latest public polls, the race in Arizona is a dead heat. Trump narrowly led Harris, but the numbers were close enough that both candidates had a real chance to win the Grand Canyon State.

Voters’ frustrations over the economy and immigration are fueling Trump’s slight lead among Arizona voters. The former president has struck a confident tone at recent rallies in Arizona, even musing from the stage in Prescott Valley that he should be in the all-important swing state of Pennsylvania instead.

“We’re going to win Arizona,” Trump said at an October rally in Tempe, noting he was pleased with the early voting numbers. “We’re going to beat Kamala Harris.”

Harris isn’t far behind, though. She is strongest on democracy and reproductive rights, and her campaign is counting on a massive ground game operation to put her over the top in a state where Democrats have made big gains during the Trump era.

“This will be a very exciting race until the end. And we are the underdog,” Harris told a crowd in Phoenix last month.

The battle for the White House was set to be a rematch between Trump and President Joe Biden in 2020, but the battle changed dramatically in late June when Biden’s disastrous debate performance against Trump sent Democrats into a panic. The president was expelled from the party by his own party within weeks. He dropped his re-election bid in July, long after the primaries were over.

That same month, Trump was nearly killed on live television when a gunman opened fire at the former president’s campaign rally in Pennsylvania. A bullet struck his ear, leaving Trump bloodied but otherwise unharmed as Secret Service agents chased him off the stage. He would be the target of another failed assassination attempt in September.

Harris stepped up to take Biden’s place just weeks before the Democratic National Convention, holding off high-profile members of her party with their own presidential ambitions and the possibility of an open convention. Harris had just three months to mount a presidential campaign in her new role as nominee. She inherited Biden’s campaign activities across the country, including in Arizona, where the groundwork for the general election has been laid since February.

This story will be updated as election results are announced.