KJZZ's Friday NewsCap: 'A ton of money' poured in to Arizona's 2024 election. Here's what it bought

Some races remain too close to call as votes continue to be counted in Arizona.

Democratic Congressman Ruben Gallego maintained his lead over Kari Lake by just over 40,000 votes — though that lead narrowed. And Democrat Kirsten Engel retook her lead over incumbent Republican Juan Ciscomani in Southern Arizona.

But those might be the only bright spots for Democrats. It’s looking like Democratic challenger Amish Shah will not unseat David Schweikert in Congressional District 1. And Tim Stringham, the Democrat who took on Republican Justin Heap to run elections at the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office, looks like he will lose.

After Democratic groups spent millions to tie or take one of the chambers of the Arizona Legislature, it’s looking like Republicans will remain in control — maybe with even more seats than before.

To talk about all of this, The Show sat down with two politicos from both sides of the aisle who likely haven’t gotten a lot of sleep this week: Democratic consultant Gaelle Esposito with Creosote Partners and Highground’s Paul Bentz.

Conversation highlights

LAUREN GILGER: I want to start with where we are. This is not all of the votes to be counted yet, despite the 97 or 98% precincts reporting, it says on the Secretary of State’s website, right? Still about 30% of votes to be counted. Where are those votes coming from, Gaelle?

GAELLE ESPOSITO: Yeah. So those are going to be those late earlies that everybody talks about, the ballots dropped off at Election Day, those people who were holding on to that two-page ballot and really making sure that they made the right decisions. And what we’ve seen traditionally in Arizona, prior to the COVID election cycles here, was those ballots breaking pretty heavily for Democrats.

And it looks like those votes — we’ll see when they’re actually counted — but it looks like those votes are going to be very beneficial to the Democratic candidates that are out there. So we’ll see when they’re counted. But yeah, we’ve got still a long way to go here.

GILGER: A long way to go. Paul, do you think those potentially Democratic votes, those early lates as we call them, might change any of these races?

PAUL BENTZ: Yeah, I think there’s a chance that a couple of them will be changed. We have about 780,000 votes left to count, 472,000 of those out of Maricopa County. So some of these county races where we’re looking at some of these swing legislative districts, as well as the Senate race, I think still are within the balance here.

I think Ruben Gallego’s up by 40,000 votes … so he still has a pretty sizable lead and has been winning so far in Maricopa County, with the exception of this last drop from last night. So I expect there’s still some races that are too close to call, but at this point it does not look like the Democrats are going to take either chamber of the state Legislature.

GILGER: OK. So a few things we still don’t know. But it does look like — I think I went up to our political reporter’s desk earlier this week, and she was writing a story and showed me her headline, and it said “red wave.” It’s looking like this is going to be a good week for Republicans.

What’s your reaction to that, Gaelle? Do you think this is as bad as it looks?

ESPOSITO: Yeah. So I think nationally it is a great year for Republicans. I think Arizona Democrats have a lot to be happy about, though, in that we continue to move to the left relative to the national environment.

Even after all the votes are counted, maybe Donald Trump loses the popular vote after everything’s done in California and New York. But right now, he looks on track for a better performance than 2016. If he wins the popular vote, he’ll be the first Republican since George W. Bush to actually win it.

So you’re looking at the best Republican year nationally possible, and it still looks like Democrats are going to hold onto the U.S. Senate seat. They might pick up a congressional seat here. The state Legislature will remain relatively the same. I think there’s a lot in Arizona that, yeah, even in a good Republican year. Republicans before would have absolutely thrashed Democrats for the vast majority of my career in this. And right now it looks, pretty much on the margins, the same.

GILGER: Taking the long view there and the glass-half-full view. Paul, you are a pollster. The polls heading into this election looked different than the results here, right? Like we did not, I don't think, expect Donald Trump to win Arizona by these kinds of margins. It looked like it was neck and neck. Are you surprised?

BENTZ: Well, it was trending Trump’s way. I think one of the things that we look at with all of the polling is that every time basically we had gone into the field, Trump made gains throughout. And part of that has to do with the fact that there is a significant amount of attacks and negativity in the field.

And I think that one of the things that we were talking about is that this two-page ballot really gave people an extended period of time. It took them longer to vote. And I think the longer that this race went on, the more that the attacks took hold, the more that it was able to swing the Republicans’ way.

At the end of the day, it looks likely that they’ll probably have about the same advantage in the state Senate. Republicans picked up two seats in the state House. But a lot of these races are a lot closer. And so we’ll have to see what these drop offs look like.

It’s been topsy-turvy election cycle. Post-COVID, we’ve seen Democrats really overperform and really show up and vote early and participate and really sort of dominate early voting, with Republicans holding back. We saw a significant uptick in Republican enthusiasm this time around. We saw them return to sort of the norm.

So this feels like previous elections prior to 2020. More of what the Arizona that Gaelle was talking about, was that the Republicans were sort of more put together. I also think they put a lot more money into this race. There’s, paid efforts, door-to-door efforts.

I’m hearing examples of seniors in particular, getting five, six, seven knocks at the door to make sure that they voted. I know that there’s a paid ballot curing effort by Republicans right now. I think there’s a lot more money poured into the race as well.

GILGER: Gaelle, what do you make of that? Because there was a lot of talk heading up to the election that the Republican National parties, at least, didn’t have a lot of a ground campaign. They had passed it off to a Turning Point Action, that Democrats might dominate in that arena. Do you think that’s not what happened?

ESPOSITO: I mean, Turning Point Action is based out of Arizona, right? And so I think you saw a lot of investment from them here. On both sides of the aisle, there was a ton of money poured into these races. And I think, to Paul’s point, there was a ton of negativity and a real focus on shifting and widening that gender gap, taking advantage of a lot of the dissatisfaction and the appetite for change that was out there.

GILGER: I want to talk about the demographic shifts that we saw in this election, in terms of the numbers. I know a lot of this is based on exit polling, so you’re welcome to say we don’t know yet. But Paul, you’re the pollster in the studio today. So talk a little bit about who showed up for Trump. Like we’re hearing a lot about kind of a broad and expanded and more diverse Republican coalition this election than has existed in the past.

BENTZ: Well, first of all, I want to be clear that I think it’s a Trump coalition, not necessarily a Republican. And I think that there’s some things that Trump does that other Republicans don’t get away with. There’s a reason why Trump is winning the state and Kari Lake is not.

But it did seem to help downballot. I stand corrected. I had often said that Trump doesn’t have very long coattails, that it was all about him and that he didn’t really bring other people across. But we do see downballot Republicans in Maricopa County and in several of these swing districts doing better than we, I think, originally anticipated.

But I think in particular, there’s some target demographics that he did much better with, one of which is men. They were spending $25,000 per commercial to be in all these sporting events, and they were very male-focused messaging about the economy, about immigration, about other items that I think really probably pushed his number pretty high in the male audience — recognizing that Harris was doing better among female respondents, particularly with abortion on the ballot.

I think they played a lot into attracting males to the cause. And I think the other thing that they did is that they got a better portion of younger voters than I think people expected. That will probably shift a little bit with these dropoffs, because I think they’ll trend much younger. But in the energized and enthused younger voters — and maybe not as young as we’re thinking, not necessarily college age but like 30-39 year olds, which have generally been more progressive leaning — I think in that area they made some inroads as well.

GILGER: Gaelle, let me ask you about women here. From what we’re seeing so far, fewer women voting for Harris than Democrats usually get. And that’s with abortion on the ballot in Arizona. What do you think happened here?

ESPOSITO: So I think one thing that we saw is abortion is a winner, right? It’s an issue that Arizonans across the political spectrum believe that there is a right to, very affirmatively. And I think one of the downsides, perhaps, for Democrats is that because they had the outlet to enshrine that in the Constitution, the necessity that they felt to make that decision on candidates was a little bit lessened because they saw, “Hey, here, I’m making it happen.”

Now, of course, federally if they decide to do a national abortion ban, that would supersede this constitutional change. But I still think that this is an issue that was a big driver. Once again, when all the ballots are counted and once we get a better sense than unreliable exit polls, you’re still going to see a pretty big gender gap and women in very large numbers supporting Democrats.

GILGER: Was the play toward men, Paul, a little bit risky? Don’t women traditionally vote in higher numbers of men?

BENTZ: Yes. Women make up at least 52% of the electorate, and some are saying that it may have come up to at least even 53. So the male play is a tougher audience. Early on, I think we saw that Harris was being very competitive in the senior demographic as well, and I think that there was a pretty solid push based on negativity.

You saw the rhetoric, particularly around immigration, become even more fiery near the end. And I think that was all in an effort to bring back and try to solidify the senior vote that had been pretty consistent for Republicans for many, many years. So I think that was part of the gamble as well.