We May Not Know the Next President on Election Day. This Arizona Swing County Could Be Why

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

62% : "Indeed, Trump, in a campaign appearance in the county in 2023 called the county's Board of Supervisors, which shares election duties with the Recorder, the most important in the country.
48% : Once less educated than the national average, the county now boasts a slightly higher share of adults with four-year-college degrees than the national average -- a key indicator of voting Democratic in the age of Trump.
45% : The county has been a regular stop for presidential candidates as they look to clinch Arizona's 11 electoral votes -- including Trump and Harris and their campaigns this year -- and it is a fulcrum on which nail-biter races that can determine control of the House of Representatives and U.S. Senate pivot.
45% : She's a Republican and devout Lutheran who's uneasy about Trump, even though she voted for him in 2020.
39% : The fast-growing county also has become home to a stew of key demographic groups in the battle for the White House: a growing Latino population, retirees, younger, newly arrived voters and a broad and deep conservative population wrestling with a pivotal splinter group -- college-educated, more affluent Republicans who've soured on the party's more pugnacious, and at times anti-democratic, turn under Trump.
37% : Though he's a developer and fan of low taxes, Keig was frustrated at how the GOP state legislature kept cutting Arizona's already-low taxes, jeopardizing education funding.
37% : It's because Maricopa -- located in a onetime reliably red state where Biden in 2020 defeated Trump by a margin of about 11,000 votes -- may be the best place to undermine confidence in national elections.
36% : When the Republican speaker of the Arizona House refused to award the state's electors to Trump, the former president's backers primaried him and forced him out of office.
35% : The drawn-out count has made the county a center of election conspiracy theories spawned by Trump.
27% : Arpaio was something of a precursor to Trump, known for his hunger for media attention and jousting with journalists, a hardline stance on immigration and a willingness to go after his critics -- he even arrested a Republican county supervisor who criticized him.
26% : Even as Trump was winning the county and Arizona, Republican Sheriff Arpaio lost his bid for a seventh term.
26% : Trump ultimately pardoned Arpaio after the sheriff was convicted of contempt of court for refusing to obey an injunction against racial profiling of Latinos.
23% : Keig couldn't bring himself to vote for Trump or his 2016 rival, Hillary Clinton.
23% : Trump falsely claimed he won Arizona after his 2020 loss, and he and his allies assailed anyone who argued otherwise.
19% : And once Trump came into office and began what Keig saw as his erratic, feud-driven approach to governing -- including fighting with Arizona's popular senior Republican Sen. John McCain, whose grandchildren Keig's own daughters knew -- Keig couldn't take it anymore.
19% : County Recorder Stephen Richer, a Republican who defended the accuracy of the county's election results, was singled out for criticism by Trump himself, and Richer and his family faced threats.
19% : In 2022, Republicans who sided with Trump against Richer and the county supervisors ran for top statewide offices, and all lost.
15% : Speaking to a group of Republicans gathered in Scottsdale to watch the debate between Trump and Biden earlier this year, she denied the shift is due to actual votes.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.