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Republicans nominally outnumber Democrats in Arizona by 283,000 voters. But in a political environment where voters overwhelmingly think President Donald Trump is doing a terrible job and poll after poll shows they plan to take out their frustrations on GOP candidates up and down the ballot, that figure will matter far less when the polls close Tuesday night than who actually showed up to cast their votes.
And if dampened enthusiasm among Republican voters means they stay home in large numbers, it could spell the end for GOP control of Arizona government.
“Republicans are counting on a stellar Election Day turnout,” said Paul Bentz, a Republican political strategist and pollster. “They need it to keep these races competitive.”
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While the most prominent boosters for Arizona Republican candidates on social media are boasting about an increase in early voting among GOP voters and say it’s a sign that the expected Democratic wave won’t materialize in 2026 — at least in the Grand Canyon State — Bentz said he’s skeptical.
“They’re acting like the voters have returned to early (voting) and the cavalry is coming over the hill on Election Day,” he said. “But I don’t know if that’s what will happen.”
Former Arizona Republican Party Chairwoman Gina Swoboda is convinced that it won’t happen. What we’re seeing this year in early voting — as of Nov. 1, more than 1.6 million ballots had been cast, with Republicans nursing a miniscule 16,000-vote edge over Democrats — is the inverse of 2022, when Trump and gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake told GOP voters to abandon mail-in ballots in favor of showing up at a polling site on Election Day.
Now, she said, Trump and Republicans are pleading with voters to return their early ballots, and many have listened. But that necessarily means that any surge of voters on Election Day will be smaller.
“We have cannibalized Election Day voters,” Swoboda said. “That bullet is out of our gun.”
Democratic campaign consultant Rodd McLeod said that the “insane Republican jihad against early voting” that Trump and others pushed in 2022 and, to a lesser extent, in 2024 seems to be subsiding, and the result is pools of consistent voters being shifted from one method of casting ballots to another — something that some are mistaking for a surge in voting that will increase the total.
“If the people who are voting early this year are reliable voters, that is not necessarily an indicator that they’re doing well (on turnout),” he said. “They won’t have the Election Day turnout they expect.”
Daniel Scarpinato, a Republican campaign strategist who oversaw the effort to defend the GOP’s majority in the Arizona Senate, said there are still a lot of votes on the table, and there are lots of “perfect voters” — those who have cast ballots in at least three of the last four elections — who will vote on Election Day.
“And there’s a lot more of those on the Republican side of the aisle,” he said. “Those are really reliable voters.”
But there is a very real enthusiasm gap, McLeod said, that is borne out in polling both in Arizona and across the nation: Republicans are unhappy with Trump’s second term and the political tides are favoring Democrats this election. The combination of that and candidates at the top of the ticket that are all-in on MAGA means some will cross party lines to vote for Democrats, while others will protest by opting out of voting altogether, he said.
Republican voters skipping the election could prove disastrous for the GOP’s nearly uninterrupted 60-year control of the Arizona Legislature.
There are signs that is exactly what’s happening. And because control of each legislative chamber hinges on just a handful of closely fought races where the winners are likely to be those candidates and parties who manage to get more of their voters to the polls, Democrats could have their best electoral showing ever in Arizona.
An internal Republican analysis of early ballots cast this year compared to 2022 shared with the Arizona Mirror by a veteran political operative found that the election-over-election increase in GOP early voters this year is almost entirely made up of voters who shifted from Election Day four years ago to mailing in a ballot this year.
And that shift is masking more than 158,000 reliable early Republican voters who haven’t yet returned their ballots — and might not vote at all. That figure includes more than 34,000 who are the most committed GOP voters: people who had voted early in at least three of the last four primary elections, but who skipped this year’s primary.
The analysis shows that the largest pools of the reliable early Republican voters who haven’t yet cast a ballot live in affluent, college-educated suburbs — and in many cases, in the competitive legislative district races that will determine whether Republicans retain their decades-long grip on power at the state Capitol.
Swoboda, the former AZGOP chairwoman, said she shares the frustration those voters have.
“I don’t think they’re coming back, because they feel betrayed and knifed. And it’s not just this year — they’ll never vote again,” she said. “I feel that way. If I wasn’t an accidental political operative, I wouldn’t have voted this year.”
Tony Cani, a Democratic campaign consultant, said the GOP candidates at the top of the ticket — Andy Biggs in the governor’s race, secretary of state nominee Alexander Kolodin and attorney general hopeful Warren Petersen — know the turnout figures are trending badly for Republicans. That’s why, he said, they’ve spent the final days of the campaign focused on getting GOP voters to the polls instead of making a “real closing argument” to Arizona voters.
“They ran a campaign thinking the voter registration advantage would be enough,” he said.
“But the cancer of Trump in the Republican Party isn’t skipping people,” Cani added, explaining that the president’s unpopularity is an albatross around the necks of GOP candidates in every race.
And even if some of those holdout Republican early voters do come home on Election Day and head to the polls, either to vote or drop off their early ballot, there’s no guarantee they’ll back the GOP candidates, said DJ Quinlan, a Democratic strategist and former executive director of the Arizona Democratic Party.
“The floor has shifted so much that it may not matter,” he said, noting that sky high gas prices because of Trump’s war in Iran and continued inflation have turned many right-of-center independent voters and “normal Republicans” against the GOP in this election.
“The real question is how many Republican legislators get wiped out,” Quinlan said, adding that he thinks Democrats will win at least one legislative chamber.
Swoboda said if that happens, it will be a case of Republican legislators reaping what they’ve sown by electing ideologues more interested in power than in governing.
“They’re unlikable people acting in an unlikeable manner,” she said, speaking of the conservative bloc that wields the most power at the legislature. “The Arizona Freedom Caucus is … vindictive people who just want power over their enemies.”
If tens of thousands of otherwise reliable GOP voters stay home, it could be cataclysmic for Republicans in Arizona, said Bentz, the pollster. The worst case scenario, he said, would be akin to the mirror image of the 2010 election, when the Tea Party wave led Republicans to supermajority control of both legislative chambers: Democrats would win all of the statewide offices and both the Arizona Senate and House of Representatives.
That’s what Swoboda believes will happen when the dust settles on the 2026 election.
“It’s a perfect storm. I think we’re going to get destroyed. It’ll be a blue trifecta,” she said.
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Courtesy of Arizona Mirror
