2 Arizona counties show Latinos shifted in favor of Trump this election

As many local races remain too close to be called, what's left to be counted?

For more on that, The Show spoke with ABC 15 data guru Garrett Archer, who has been tirelessly following the numbers through all of this.

Full conversation

LAUREN GILGER: So let's start with what's left to be counted here. We had Wayne Schutsky from KJZZ on our show earlier this morning talking about Democrats kind of banking on those early ballots that were dropped off on Election Day. How many are left?

GARRETT ARCHER: It looks like we have probably around a million ballots left to be counted here that are the sum total of all late early is what we call in the, you know, we call them late early ballots, which are the ballots that are dropped off on Election Day.

GILGER: So a million sounds like a whole lot. How much could that impact some of these tight races? What are you watching for as these, as these votes continue to be counted in the next several days?

ARCHER: Well, what I find in my experience is that the late early drop offs tend to be, sort of, it's a mix of both the early votes and the Election Day votes. So, but it's a muted version of each.

So for example, you know, last night or, excuse me, on Election Day, Donald Trump did tend to win Election Day votes by a pretty considerable amount, you know, 20, 30 points in some places, including Maricopa County where the early vote, vote was the opposite. Harris tended to win early vote drops and so the Election Day ballots, excuse me, the drop off tend to be sort of a mix of both. So it and it really depends on what that mix it.

So, there we will start seeing them come in today and we will be able to see what those trends are and see if they are friendly or friendly to Democrats or if they're basically just, you know, a wash if you will.

GILGER: Yeah, a wash. So do those trends, when you start to see those numbers come in today, do those trends tend to hold?

ARCHER: Yeah, the early about trends do, excuse me, the, the late early ballots trends do tend to hold, you know, it's, it's just the way that sort of statistics works. It's a large population of people and, and it will tend to be, you know, in certain counties they tend to vote the same.

So, you know, the late early drop offs in Pinal County are going to behave, you know,, a certain way, even, no matter what the batches are. Maricopa might be different here and there only because it just depends on where the batches come from Maricopa. It's just so large. We'll find that sometimes, you know, just, just by happenstance, late early ballots favor one area of the county over another and that might change it ever so slightly.

GILGER: Interesting. It's so granular. I want to talk about overall turnout that we know so far, at least in Arizona and, and how that broke down along party lines. You mentioned that what happened on, like who showed up to vote at the polls on Election Day. How did that favor Republicans versus Democrats?

ARCHER: We will have a better idea of what the actual numbers are a little later once all histories are loaded into the, the, you know, county recorder systems. But what I can say is that, just based on the results, it looks like probably the presidential election with the widest partisan split in Arizona between Republican and Democrat for some time. And going in, just a registration split was the largest in history for Republicans in Arizona. And it looks like the electorate, the people who actually turned out to vote is going to be that way, too.

We may not even have records going back far enough to a vote histories to see another partisan split bigger than what we're going to see once the histories are loaded. I'm thinking it's probably going to be, you know, +8 Republican.

GILGER: Very interesting. And yes, that voter registration advantage for Republicans is so big. Now, how did an independent stack up with what we've seen so far, Garrett?

ARCHER: It really depended on when they voted. So the independents that voted early did tend to support the Democratic candidate, and then the independents that voted on Election Day tend to support the, the Republican candidate. And so, and that's yet another reason why the late earlys would be so interesting, is which independents actually dropped off their ballot. Would it, would it be the ones that tend to support the, you know, have a behavior of voting early and thus, you know, tend to support the Democrat, or the opposite?

GILGER: Very interesting. What do we know so far about demographic breakdowns here? You know some of the demographic breakdowns of the counties in which these votes are being counted from, right. We've heard so much about how the Latino vote seems to sway, to seem to sway to Trump yesterday, especially among men. Are we able to extrapolate any of that right now in Arizona?

ARCHER: Yes. Yes. So we can extrapolate a little bit of that right now, just based on two of our counties that have the highest Hispanic population in the state. And that's Santa Cruz County and Yuma County. So Santa Cruz is about 85% Hispanic. …

Donald Trump, he didn't win Santa Cruz, but in 2020, he got 31.7%. Right now, he's holding at 40.4%. So that is 8 point advantage, 8 point over performance of where he was in 2020 with Santa Cruz. And then in Yuma County, which is about 60% Hispanic. Donald Trump does have a, you know, Republicans can win that, that county and have in the past. He won it in 2020, 52% of the vote, and, but this time he's winning 65%. So that's a 12 point change in his favor this year. So it does look like Hispanics really did shift pretty, just really did shift in favor of Donald Trump this time.

GILGER: Wow. OK. Last question for you in the last 30 seconds or so here. What do we know about the gender breakdown here? A lot of talk about how this election had a lot to do with gender.

ARCHER: Yes. And what I could tell you about that is that the early ballots did tend to favor women voters, and women, eventually the electorate will be majority of women. But the early ballots were favoring women voters.

But in Maricopa County, at least where we had live check ins, yesterday as those, those people were checking in to vote and voting, I did do a gender breakdown of them and found that they were actually the men. So most mostly men came out yesterday to vote. And that's, and since men as we've seen in the polling do tend to favor Donald Trump, that's one of the reasons why we saw such large vote shares for him coming in last night.