How to Lose a Swing State

Donald Trump needs Arizona on his side in November. Losing the state and its 11 Electoral College votes would, at the very least, mean a drastically narrower path back to the White House. Keeping Arizona red shouldn’t be a challenge; the state has long been a Republican stronghold. But Arizona is changing rapidly, and right now, the forecast for the GOP looks grim: In 2018, Kyrsten Sinema became the first Democrat to win a Senate race in the state since the 1980s, and Joe Biden has been leading in the presidential polls there for weeks. In this year’s Senate race, the astronaut turned Democratic candidate Mark Kelly is ahead of the incumbent Republican Martha McSally by a comfortable margin. And after the state was reopened by its Republican governor, it experienced a massive surge in COVID-19 infections.

One might think that, in its moment