In latest batch, Trump gets share of votes he would need to reclaim Arizona. But next rounds of ballots present new challenges
As Maricopa County released the results from 140,000 more ballots on Wednesday night and Thursday morning, President Donald Trump received almost the exact share he would need to charge back to win Arizona’s 11 electoral votes and potentially reelection.
Trump won the batches of ballots from Maricopa County counted Wednesday and early Thursday by a roughly 57-40 margin over former Vice President Joe Biden.
Those votes — likely early ballots sent to the county on Monday and Tuesday — narrowed Biden’s lead over Trump in Arizona to 68,000 votes, when his lead had been more than 90,000 votes earlier Wednesday.
Paul Bentz, a Republican pollster with the consulting firm HighGround, said Trump needs to win 57.6% of the 470,000 votes that The Arizona Republic estimates remain to be counted.
“That’s almost exactly what he got in the first batch,” Bentz said. “He could do it.”
But the problem for Trump is that he needs to replicate that performance across all of the remaining 470,000 votes left to count in the state. And he needs to do it across all Arizona’s 15 diverse counties, which include areas that are very blue: Pima, Coconino and Santa Cruz counties.
Trump needs to repeat that performance “with every single batch, with every single ballot, with every single day,” Bentz said. “The first step in the long journey was a successful one in Trump’s tightrope walk.”
The president also needs to maintain that vote margin through different batches of ballots that include those that arrived in the mail before Election Day, early ballots dropped off at the polls on Election Day, and provisional ballots that voters cast because they didn’t have the right form of identification or went to the wrong polling place.
Provisional votes tend to trend Democratic and there are a total of 36,000 provisional votes in Maricopa and Pima counties, about 18,000 in each.
BALLOT MAP: Click or hover over each Arizona county to see the estimated number of ballots they have left to count, the number of ballots they have reported and Biden or Trump’s lead. The outstanding ballot estimates are based on either Arizona Secretary of State’s Office data or Arizona Republic surveys of counties.
One might expect Trump to maintain the same margin for the remaining 108,000 early ballots that were sent in the mail to Maricopa County on Monday and Tuesday, Bentz said. But no one knows what the votes look like from the early ballots dropped off at the polls, he said.
Those votes could go even more for Trump, just as the votes on Election Day did, or they could act like early votes dropped off at the polls traditionally do, which is trend Democratic, he said.
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