The Arizona county that could determine the presidency

Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota will conduct the next leg of their running mate rollout tour in Phoenix, Arizona. It’s part of Harris’s increased focus on Arizona. Polling shows she is gaining ground in the state against Donald Trump.

Her campaign has launched a “Republicans for Harris” event in Arizona already, and Mesa’s Republican Mayor John Giles has endorsed her.

The Harris campaign says it has almost 100 full-time staff in the state, and will open 18 offices. Those offices will include one in the city of Tempe and one in North Phoenix, both of which are in Maricopa County.

Harris’s decision to go all-in on Phoenix, specifically Maricopa County, shows that the campaign knows Arizona will be won there.

Historically, Maricopa County was Republican country. In 1964, when Barry Goldwater was wallopped everywhere except the deep South due to his opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, he narrowly won Arizona because he performed well in Maricopa County.

Then in 2000, four years after Bill Clinton broke a perfect streak for Republicans since 1948, George W Bush put Maricopa back in the Republican column and he won it again in 2004. The state’s senior senator John McCain won Maricopa by double digits in 2008, which helped him keep Arizona.

While all that was happening, county Sheriff Joe Arpaio was busy earning a reputation as a tough law enforcement officer, forcing inmates whose lives he believed were too comfortable to wear pink underwear and sleep in tents in the sweltering Arizona heat. His crackdown on undocumented immigrants also served as a template for Donald Trump’s style of politics.

But 2016 showed signs of change. Trump would only win Arizona by 4.1 points