The Today, Explained podcast is taking a deep dive into the major themes of the 2024 election through the lens of seven battleground states. We’ve heard from voters in Georgia and Pennsylvania so far, and now we turn to Arizona, where abortion access and immigration are both on the ballot.
Will abortion rights help turn out voters in Arizona?
Arizona’s dueling ballot measures on abortion and immigration, explained.
Victoria Chamberlin was an audio producer at Vox, where she has been making Today, Explained since April 2021. She previously worked at DC-based NPR partner station WAMU as a radio reporter, producer for The Kojo Nnamdi Show, and reporting fellow for the public radio collaborative Guns and America.
All signs point to an excruciatingly close election in Arizona. President Joe Biden won the state by less than a point in 2020, and it will likely be central in either candidate’s path to victory in 2024. This year, however, two high-profile ballot measures could drive turnout: one on abortion, the other on immigration.
Abortion has been a defining issue in Arizona politics since the fall of Roe v. Wade in June 2022, when a 15-week ban on abortion took effect. In early 2024, however, the Arizona Supreme Court cleared the way for an even more stringent Civil War-era ban to be enforced (though it didn’t immediately take effect).
Enacted in 1864 — before Arizona ever became a state and before women could vote — the ban made performing or helping someone get an abortion a felony at any number of weeks. The only exception was to save the life of the pregnant person.
The ban was subsequently repealed in May 2024, despite efforts to maintain it by some Republican lawmakers in the Arizona legislature. That whiplash of the ban’s near-enforcement and then repeal, however, caused widespread confusion among Arizonans and galvanized pro-abortion activists to take action.
Activists gathered nearly 600,000 verified signatures in support of an amendment securing the right to an abortion in Arizona’s state constitution. Proposition 139, the ballot measure that will determine the amendment’s fate, would allow abortion up to the point of fetal viability, around 22 to 25 weeks of pregnancy.
“Proposition 139 would essentially codify Roe versus Wade,” Camryn Sanchez, a reporter for the Phoenix-area NPR affiliate KJZZ, told Vox. The amendment would also ensure that future laws cannot restrict a person from having an abortion at any point in pregnancy, even after the fetal viability line, if their health is at risk.
According to Sanchez, abortion is a top issue for many voters in the state, and Proposition 139’s presence on ballots could have a mobilizing effect for Democrats. “If Democrats do have sweeping wins this year in Arizona, I think they can write a thank you letter to the abortion access people,” Sanchez said.
Is immigration still a difference-maker for Arizona Republicans?
If Arizona Democrats hope abortion will help turn out their voters, though, the Arizona GOP has an issue of its own: immigration. GOP lawmakers hoping to capitalize on concerns about illegal border crossings introduced Proposition 314, a ballot measure they hope will result in a comparable bump in turnout. Sanchez thinks it might work. “I think we’ve seen border security sort of be a parallel or comparable issue in a way,” she said.
Specifically, Proposition 314 would give local law enforcement the authority to arrest anyone who crosses the border with Mexico outside of a legal port of entry. Frustrations with immigration and border security are top of mind for voters across the political spectrum in Arizona, and many voters tie problems with fentanyl to the border. If approved, the measure would include new penalties for dealing the drug in specific circumstances.
Whether the measure succeeds in boosting former President Donald Trump’s odds in the state is an open question. Arizona has long voted for Republicans — prior to 2020, the state had not gone for a Democrat since Bill Clinton in 1996 — but a changing electorate has transformed it into a battleground state up and down the ballot for the foreseeable future.
The state’s increasingly radical Republican Party has also ceded ground to Democrats in statewide elections, including a number of key offices. “We have a Democratic governor for the first time in a minute. We’ve got a Democratic secretary of state. We’ve got a Democratic attorney general. And before 2016, there was nothing of the sort,” Sanchez said.
But it’s not just a reaction to extreme candidates and their behavior post-2020 that is turning the state purple. The electorate has changed dramatically over the last 20 years. According to UCLA’s Latino Policy and Politics Institute, the Latino-eligible voter population in Arizona is now 25 percent of the state’s electorate, more than double what it was in 2000.
Even more critical is Maricopa County. Home to Phoenix, Arizona’s largest city, and more than 60 percent of the state’s population, Maricopa County reliably leaned Republican in presidential elections until recently. As the Republican Party has changed, though, its voting patterns shifted accordingly.
That change, and the fracturing it has wrought in the Republican Party, could make the difference in November, immigration ballot measure or no.
“There’s a huge difference now in the Republican Party,” Sanchez said. “We’ve got the Trump loyalists, the MAGA Republicans, the Freedom Caucus members. And then the McCain Republicans, and that has been difficult, I think, for the party to reconcile.”
