Harris brings new energy to Democrats in Arizona, but still faces challenges mending cracks in Biden’s 2020 coalition

By John King, CNN

Casa Grande, Arizona (CNN) — It is 101 degrees, the desert sun in full force. Yet Pablo Correa and Jacob Dials are smiling as they go door to door, foot soldiers in a progressive army that suddenly has a bouncy spring in its step.

“There’s a lot more enthusiasm,” Dials said in an interview between canvassing stops. “There’s a lot more energy around. … Folks who were still planning on voting are a lot more enthusiastic about voting. Now we are hearing conversations like, ‘Oh, I already told my friends, my family, my neighbor to go out and vote,’ versus ‘yeah, I’m going to go out and vote, probably.’”

The source of the change, of course, is the switch atop the Democratic ticket. Correa said canvassers who were loyal to President Joe Biden are now excited by Vice President Kamala Harris, seeing her as a candidate with more vigor, more diversity and, critically, more support.

“We definitely feel it is our duty to defend democracy,” said Correa, who served in the Marine Corps.

“Duty for us is sustainable and that is how it felt prior to Harris taking the top of the ticket. Now, there’s excitement and if you can throw excitement on top of duty … folks really want to jump in and be involved.”

Canvassing is hard and often thankless work at any time. Correa, Dials and their Rural Arizona Action colleagues, though, are next-level. Their mission is to target rural areas where the homes can be far apart and where residents are sometimes unwelcoming, even hostile. Here, knock on 100 doors and, on average, just 16 or 17 people will answer and engage in at least brief conversation.

Our time with Correa and Dials was spent in two neighborhoods in Casa Grande, about an hour south of Phoenix. One was a working-class development lined with modest trailers or small prefabricated homes, most of them rental properties occupied by local factory workers. The other was an area of neatly lined streets of single-family homes. Casa Grande is in Pinal County, a reliably red area where Donald Trump won both in 2016 and 2020 with nearly 60% support.

Democratic voters are harder to come by here, but finding them could matter in a state Biden won in 2020 by little more than 10,000 votes. So before heading out, the office pep talk includes a mention of the calendar — inside 100 days to the election now — and one of how the mood can get more testy as the voting draws closer.

“We know it is getting hot out there,” Correa told a room packed with young activists. “We definitely know it is not just the temperature. We just keep it moving. Tell them thank you, have a good day.”

Along the office walls are boxes filled with handouts the canvassers can give voters or leave at the door if no one answers. Some are for local races. Others are for Congress. One is now a keepsake of a campaign like no other: a flyer urging support — in English and Spanish — for Biden and Ruben Gallego, the Democratic candidate for an open Senate seat.

The new version, with Harris, was at the print shop when we visited.

“We, of course, would have supported Joe Biden for the presidency,” Correa said. “But there is something closer to home with Harris atop the ticket.”

Dials, likewise, explained why the switch changed so much.

“It’s way easier to support a candidate who you can actually go out and see campaign,” he said. “You have that energy around you.”

Our visit was part of a CNN project called All Over the Map that is following the 2024 campaign through the eyes and experiences of voters who live in battleground states and are part of critical voting blocs. Activists like these canvassers are already decided, but tagging along with them is a ground-level way of testing all the Democratic talk of new support now that Harris is the presumptive nominee.

New excitement for the Democratic case against Trump

Melissa Cordero says her calendar is proof the new juice is legitimate.

A Tucson resident, she was loyal to Biden and talked of the policy contrast with Trump when we first met four months ago. Now, Cordero smiles at every mention of Harris; uses the vice president’s first name; and shares that her email and calendar are full of new organizing events and ideas to help Harris, including some by Common Defense, a progressive veterans organization.

“Not all veterans are for Trump,” said Cordero, who served in the Air Force. “Not all veterans are, you know, MAGA crazy Second Amendment people. There are ones out there that truly believe in democracy. And, you know, we want things like our reproductive freedom. … I think Kamala coming in has brought this just — just energy that wasn’t there.”

Our Arizona visit included myriad examples of what we also found while visiting an All Over the Map group in Pennsylvania just after the president ended his reelection bid and endorsed Harris: The words and expressions used by Democrats now expose plainly what was missing in Biden.

“What Kamala brings is just the sharpness that I think we need right now,” Cordero said. “This exactness … is rallying the party and I don’t think that was really happening.”

The challenge for Harris — and for committed supporters like Cordero — is to sustain the energy for three months.

One way, Cordero said, is for Harris to draw forceful policy contrasts with Trump on immigration, national security, and issues she says are pivotal in Arizona. “The majority of us are living one accident away from being unsheltered,” Cordero said. “Jobs, money, rent caps — all the things that cause a lot of stress.”

Also important, in Cordero’s view, are constant reminders of the Trump-Vance agenda.

“Every election is important,” Cordero said. “But there are a lot of things coming from Trump’s camp that would just completely change life as we know it. Reproductive freedom, trans health care, all this stuff. A lot of people would be affected immediately. And we just have to stay motivated around them.”

Cordero is clearly no fan of Trump. But she and many of her fellow veterans here are alarmed by the tension in today’s politics. Common Defense was among the organizers of a weekend vigil to condemn political violence, including the assassination attempt on Trump.

“No one should be afraid to run,” Cordero said. “No one should be afraid to support and to vote. When you see something like that happen at that level, shooting at a former president, it’s just shaky. It’s scary.”

Can Harris repair the cracks in Biden’s coalition?

Turning probable voters into likely voters is critical. So, too, is getting more small donors, more volunteers willing to knock on doors or work phone banks. Our Democratic voters — who for months talked of holding their breath, hoping Biden would not make things worse for their party’s chances — now express pride in seeing Harris aggressively make the case against Trump. And that kind of confidence fosters more on-the-ground action.

“Door-knock and canvass and all that other good stuff,” is how Cordero put it. “That wasn’t really happening before.”

But to engineer a Harris win, all that new energy would have to translate into significant progress in repairing serious cracks in the 2020 Biden coalition. Here in Arizona, struggles with Latinos and younger voters top the list. Winning back independents and moderate suburban Republicans would come next here.

Nico Rios is skeptical Harris can pull it off.

He was too young to vote in 2020 but supported Biden. He is 19 now, eager to vote and passionate as he compares Trumpism to fascism. But he is equally passionate as he ticks through his disagreements with Biden-Harris immigration policies. And he’s most animated when he discusses joining protests in recent months critical of Israel’s conduct in the conflict with Hamas and the Biden-Harris administration’s continued aid, including military equipment, to the Netanyahu government.

“I can’t commit to the Democrats,” said Rios. “I used to think they were better. But I just don’t anymore.”

Rios acknowledged Harris was forceful after her recent meeting with the Israeli prime minister, making clear it was time for Israel to accept a ceasefire and stop the killing of civilians in Gaza. But he has no faith in either major political party, lumping Harris in with a political class he believes promises a lot but follows through on little.

“There’s nothing that Kamala can do in the next what, two three months, that can wash that blood from her hands in my view,” said Rios. He plans to vote for Claudia De la Cruz, the presidential candidate of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, who wants to end all US aid to Israel.

Rios has no illusions that his candidate can win, but hopes the legacy of 2024 includes significant growth for third parties.

“Now’s the time,” Rios said in an interview. “The two parties have never been more unpopular.”

Rios took part in several marches and vigils to protest the deaths in Gaza. Most had a few hundred participants, the biggest maybe 2,000, he said. Modest numbers, but again margins matter in the close battlegrounds, and where Rios lives is a place to watch in the campaign’s final stretch.

Gilbert is just southeast of Phoenix and one of the fastest-growing suburban communities in the country. In the 2000 census, Gilbert’s population was just over 117,000. Now it is above 275,000 and the median age is 34. It’s full of the younger and suburban voters behind Arizona’s shift from reliably red to competitive.

Rios is determined to vote third-party. “That’s struggle, right?” he said. “You fight, you lose, you learn and then you fight again.”

But he does acknowledge a change among some friends and peers since Harris emerged as the Democratic candidate.

“I’ve certainly had friends who asked me, or had conversations about, you know: ‘What is Kamala’s deal? Is she better? Is she this? Is she that?’” Rios said. “And so those conversations are certainly happening. I just don’t know if they are happening in the numbers that the Democratic Party was hoping for.”

An independent looking for change to the political system

Ray Flores is a different kind of challenge for Harris.

He is an independent and a Tucson restaurateur. His family’s iconic El Charro, where we first met four months ago, is the building block of a business that now includes a dozen establishments. We met this time at Charro Steak, a bustling dinner stop in a brick downtown building that once housed a Studebaker dealership.

His bottom line is unchanged since March: if he had to vote today, Flores said he would pick a third-party option, likely the Libertarian Party.

Flores has little faith in the two major parties, seeing them as too focused on power and personalities and more eager to stir division than to make the tough compromises necessary for progress on immigration and other issues that he says make running a successful business difficult.

“This is just so broken,” he said. “They just do things to win.”

As an independent, Flores gets text messages and emails from campaigns and causes across the spectrum.

He describes them this way: “Let’s humiliate the other one. Let’s destroy the other one. It’s not, ‘Hey, let’s win.’ It’s humiliation. It’s destruction.”

He has been getting up early to watch the Olympics with his son, and Flores finds it refreshing.

“I like when our country is shaking hands and hugging other countries,” Flores said. “I wish that politics had the same respect for competition that sports does.”

Flores was just back from a monthlong family vacation to Europe when we met this time. He was overseas when a gunman opened fire at a Trump rally in Pennsylvania and when Biden made his dramatic decision to step aside from the campaign.

“I’m a little bit lost,” Flores said. “Our system, our brand — let’s call it our brand — was being laughed at. And that was hurtful. … Our brand is important, and it was being laughed at and I didn’t like that we were the butt of the joke. I’m not without knowledge that we have issues, but to be the butt of a joke — that was painful.”

Now, Flores described himself as “drinking through a fire hydrant” to get caught up on what he missed — in his business and in the presidential campaign.

“I mean, this is a whole new game, right?” Flores said. “I do look forward to seeing some kind of debate between them. I think that would be more than good television. I think it would be eye-opening to see how they respond to each other.”

Still third-party for now, but in the lingo of his business, Flores sees a moment to take another look at the menu.

“This is fresh, new,” Flores said. “So, I think we should all kind of peel back and look at this in a fresh new way.”

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