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Sarah (BBC Washington Bureau)

Every vote matters, of course, in the upcoming midterm elections in November in the United States. You've got Democrats thinking that they could seize control of Congress and that would be absolutely crucial for Donald Trump's future for the next two years. But every vote in Arizona might matter a little bit more than others. It's an absolutely key battleground state. They've now just had their primary elections and chosen the candidates who are going to go into November's race. And Donald Trump on a pretty clean slate with all of his nominees going on to victory. But is that going to help them? Voters are increasingly unhappy with Donald Trump's performance in the White House. It's possible his endorsement isn't going to help his candidates in Arizona. Welcome to AmericasT AmericasT AmericaT from BBC News.

Anthony (BBC Washington Bureau)

You hear that sound? Oh, I think when I hear that sound, it reminds me of money.

Political Figure / Hearing Speaker

We didn't start this war, but under President Trump, we are finishing it.

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This is a big cover up and

Political Figure / Hearing Speaker

this administration is engaged in it.

Sarah (BBC Washington Bureau)

This guy has Trump derangement syndrome.

Zohran Mamdani

I have four words for you. Turn the volume up.

Sarah (BBC Washington Bureau)

Hello, it's Sarah here in the BBC's Washington bureau.

Anthony (BBC Washington Bureau)

And it's Anthony right here with Sarah in Washington, D.C. we're recording this on Wednesday morning.

Sarah (BBC Washington Bureau)

And last night, voters in Arizona selected the candidates that are going to run in November's election. They finished their primary voting there. So we now know which Republicans and Democrats are going to be competing against each other for a number of elections there. And this matters, Anthony does, not just as a referendum on the president, but also because Arizona is a pretty crucial electoral battleground.

Anthony (BBC Washington Bureau)

It is going to be a crucial state in the November midterm elections. There are a handful of House of Representatives seats currently held by Republicans that Democrats are targeting to flip. And if they can win there, they will be able to take control of the House of Representatives, I think, if things break their way elsewhere in the country. But it will be a very good bellwether for how Democrats are doing if they do well in Arizona. The other thing is there are some statewide races, governor's race, secretary of state, attorney general, ones that while are important to Arizona this year and next year are going to be really important because those are the people who are going to be in charge of the state in the 2028 presidential election. And Arizona is definitely one of the key battleground states in presidential elections. Now, Donald Trump won it in 2016, Joe Biden flipped it in 2020. Donald Trump won it in 2024. So it has picked the winner now going on 12 years, and it is going to be hotly contested in 2028 as well.

Sarah (BBC Washington Bureau)

And the person who won, I think probably Anthony, we could say, is Donald Trump, isn't it?

Anthony (BBC Washington Bureau)

Well, his candidates won. We've talked about some states that have bucked Donald Trump's endorsements and gone with other candidates, Iowa being one of the biggest examples of that. But Donald Trump still clearly has sway in Arizona. And the candidacy he backed from the top to the bottom all ended up winning the Republican nominations. Now, whether they can win in the general election in November, when they're going up against Democrats, I think that will be the real test to whether Donald Trump won the primary night or not.

Sarah (BBC Washington Bureau)

Yeah, because some of the reasons he was backing these candidates might not help them in the general election. You've got several who are election deniers, as it's called. These people who still say that Donald Trump won the 2020 election, some of them are actively involved in trying to overturn the 2020 election. So, yeah, they go into this election with millstones around their neck, possibly hung there by Donald Trump himself.

Anthony (BBC Washington Bureau)

Yeah, it's an interesting collection of characters that the Republicans have picked. Jay Feely, who is a former NFL player, punter, journeyman, punter. He'd been around to various teams he might be, ended up running against a Democrat in that race who was a team position on the New York jets when Thiele was a punter. So that'd be kind of an interesting face off. Andy Biggs, who is running for governor, he's a Republican member of Congress currently, as you mentioned, he supported Donald Trump's efforts to contest the 2020 presidential election from his seat and the House of Representatives. He voted against confirming Joe Biden's election victory, although he did in the race for the primary, try to distance himself a little bit from that vote. But the guy who's going to be, wants to be the head of Arizona's elections, the person who would oversee all of the elections. He actively tried to get those elections overturned. The state of Arizona helped fund some of the challenges to ballot counting and actually was sanctioned by the state bar for his efforts. So obviously among Republican voters, they didn't mind the election denial, as they say, from some of these people, and also went with the celebrities and the interesting kind of candidates that Donald Trump endorsed.

Sarah (BBC Washington Bureau)

Yeah. So just on the election denial. Now, you could end up, if these Republicans were to win their races in a situation where the governor, the Secretary of State, who as you say is in charge of overseeing elections, and the attorney general, all election deniers overseeing the 2028 presidential election, all of whom also have said that they are keen on trying to restrict voting. So they support Donald Trump's SAVE act, which would mean that people had to prove their citizenship in order to register to vote and take ID to polling stations. But also they can introduce restrictions just statewide, can't they, limiting early voting and things like that if they wanted to.

Anthony (BBC Washington Bureau)

Arizona actually is one of the states where it's pretty easy to vote early in person. You can go for weeks ahead of the election and cast your vote in polling places. And in fact, that's something that a lot of Arizonans, Republicans and Democrats do. So they could put new restrictions. That state has tried in the past to put restrictions requiring proof of citizenship to vote, to limit the ability to gather mail in ballots by individuals who can go door to door and help send in these ballots for people who filled them out mail in at home. So all of these things could come back up again. Right now, the Democrats actually have done pretty well in Arizona. The governor, Katie Hobbs, is a Democrat in her first term, fairly popular right now. She's a moderate and has kind of been forced into her moderation by Republican controlled legislature. But she is running in the state that Donald Trump won by 5 percentage points in 2024, which is one of the reasons why she's got a big target on her back. The two senators in that state are both Democrats. Where the real battle is going to be interesting to see beyond those state races, the governor's race and those other ones down ballot that you mentioned, or in some of the House races, because there are a couple of closely contested House seats that are currently held by Republicans and Democrats are really anxious to flip. And if they can do that, if they can pick up a couple of seats in the House in Arizona, that will get them well on their way to taking back control of the House of representatives in the 20 in these upcoming 2026 midterm elections.

Sarah (BBC Washington Bureau)

And so looking at that, you would be tempted to think that that's representative of how American voters have changed their mind about Donald Trump or about different candidates. But of course, a lot of it is because the states demographics have changed, isn't it? You've got a lot of new people moving into the states, college educated voters coming in, people bringing more Democratic voters

Anthony (BBC Washington Bureau)

with a lot of Californians, liberal Californians fleeing, the high price of property in that state, the high cost of living, a lot of immigrants coming and a lot of people coming from the north or more liberal states in the Midwest who are retiring down there or looking for opportunity. So yeah, the demographics, the state, the population of the state has grown considerably and the demographics have changed. But the conservative part of that state still is really conservative. It's a battleground state, but it's not a battleground state because there are a lot of swing voters in the middle who are moderates. It is a battleground state because the super conservatives in that state are now balanced out by more liberals. So you see and you saw after that 2020 election, the right wing of that state really up in arms about the results, very angry that Joe Biden won the state. They were the ones who were demonstrating outside the Coliseum where they were counting the ballots. They're the ones who forced that hand recount, if you remember, the privately funded hand recount where they took all the ballots back in and tested the paper to see if it came from China and looked at all of these things. Never found any evidence of any kind of a fraud. But it was all kind of circulating there at the time. In fact, Andy Biggs, the Republican congressman who we talked about, who is now the Republican nominee for governor, he was in a bit of a back and forth during a congressional hearing with Jamie Raskin, a congressman from Maryland, about his support for that recount and his questioning of the 2020 election results. Let's listen to that back and forth in that hearing in 2021.

Political Figure / Hearing Speaker

Do you accept this audit which showed that Joe Biden won and indeed by more votes then? That is not what the audit concluded, Mr. Raskin. You know better than that. Have you read the whole audit or you cherry picked the line which talks about the recount versus the tabulation machines that we would have expected to be very similar. And it was. And so anything that might have inured to President Biden's effect, that's my question, is my question, Mr. Banks. I'm happy to yield to you for that. Who won the election in Arizona? Donald Trump? We don't know because as the audit it demonstrates Very clearly, Mr. Raskin, there are a lot of issues with this election that took place. We're going to go through those today. But you can continue speaking of the big lie, you can continue to perpetuate it as long as you want, but we're going to find out. Madam Chair, there is the problem that we have. Donald Trump refused to accept the results. And unfortunately, we have one of the world's great political parties which has followed him off of the ledge of this electoral lunacy.

Sarah (BBC Washington Bureau)

And Anthony, what we could hear there was that it was this loyalty test that there is still in the Republican Party where if you want Donald Trump's favor, you have to say you believe the 2020 election was stolen from him, whether you really believe that or not. And in fact, even just in the last couple of weeks, we've had other people in front of hearings on the hill now in 2026, still unable to say who they think won the 2020 election because if they were to tell the truth, Donald Trump would break. But it really can be a problem, can't it, when people go into a general election and they're stuck with this, Democrats will use this against these candidates.

Anthony (BBC Washington Bureau)

You know, another interesting thing about Andy Biggs is that aipac, the American Israel lobbying group, just pulled their support for him because he was one of the members of Congress who voted to cut off funding support US Military aid to Israel in the House of Representatives. I'm curious to see whether that plays at all in Arizona. But where it's certainly plain is among Democrats as well, who overwhelmingly voted to try to cut off military support for Israel. And attitudes towards Israel, maybe even more in the Democratic Party than the Republican Party, are becoming an electoral issue, as we just saw in New York last night, with Zofram Mamdani announcing that he was not going to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu when he comes to speak to the UN General assembly as much as maybe he wants to.

Zohran Mamdani

My administration has reviewed every avenue available under applicable law to determine whether New York City could execute the International Criminal Court's arrest warrant if Benjamin Netanyahu came here. It is clear that we do not have the independent legal authority to enforce this warrant. The federal government, however, does, and I call on them to join the ICC and execute this warrant. And I want to be equally clear. Benjamin Netanyahu is not welcome in New York City, nor is any other war criminal at large. While we cannot end the genocide on our own, we can decide whether our silence will become another weapon. And we can examine every tool we have to defend the humanity and dignity of all people. That is my commitment to you.

Sarah (BBC Washington Bureau)

So, just to be clear, the International Criminal Court has issued a warrant for the arrest of Benjamin Netanyahu, but America is not a signatory to the icc, so they're not compelled to arrest him if he appears in the United States.

Roslyn (Listener from Essex)

States.

Sarah (BBC Washington Bureau)

Sora Mandani has said he would very much like to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu, and he is due in New York probably in September, for a meeting at the United nations there. But Mandani has concluded he doesn't have the power to arrest Netanyahu, but he is urging Donald Trump and the federal government to do so. That's not going to happen, is it?

Anthony (BBC Washington Bureau)

Not going to happen. Mamdani campaigned on arresting him as well. He said that on the campaign trail, has said it in an interview just recently. So in a way, this is kind of walking that back, saying, well, I can't do it. But if there were any question about whether Donald Trump and the federal government were going to do that, Trump was pretty definitive saying that in a true social post, Benjamin Netanyahu will not be arrested in any way, shape or form while in the United States of America, full stop. So this is interesting in that here you have Zohran Mamdan, who really does represent the beating heart of the Democratic base. And I think that polls show that a lot of Democrats do also view Netanyahu as a war criminal. Who they have questions about American support for Israel. They view what's happening in Gaza as genocide. The fact that Mamdani wasn't able to follow through on that promise is one thing. But it is going to be, I think, an issue in these midterm elections because members of Congress will have a chance to vote on funding for Israel. And if more Democrats go to Congress, then there's a chance that that bill, that that was shot down with a lot of Democratic support and some Republican support, like Biggs, might pass. And then in the 2028 presidential election, you can bet your tail that every single Democratic candidate running for their party's nomination is going to be asked, do they think Netanyahu is a war criminal? Would they support arresting him if he sets foot on American soil. And they would have that call if they were elected into the White House.

Sarah (BBC Washington Bureau)

Yeah. Because this risk is becoming an enormously divisive issue within the Democratic Party because it's not every Democrat voter who has completely turned against Israeli policy or Benjamin Netanyahu. I mean, don't forget Joe Biden's response to October 7th was to fly to Israel and give Benjamin Netanyahu the biggest hug he possibly could and hold him as close as he could as an ally. And obviously he's still a close ally of Donald Trump's. But we are in a position, as you say, where a lot of younger Democratic politicians are moving away for their support of Israeli policy. And it's going to become a real test of faith, I think, in Democratic elections in years to come.

Anthony (BBC Washington Bureau)

Yeah. Because Jewish voters are traditionally Democratic voters. They're part of the Democrats base. And how they view this, whether they and a lot of them don't approve of what Netanyahu is doing in Israel, but if they view this as rising, a part of rising anti Semitism in the United States. And depending on how Democrats and people on the left frame their rhetoric and how they address this issue, those fears could be inflamed. This does risk dividing Democrats. It certainly caused a lot of heartburn for Biden when he was initially running for reelection 2024 and when he was not doing as well in some of those Democratic presidential primaries where he was the only name on the ballot. And in places like Michigan, there were a lot of people voting for none of the above for non committed instead of voting for Biden purely on this issue. So, yes, the base in the Democratic Party has moved more towards an anti Israeli kind of viewpoint. But that risks then alienating the other half of it, the moderates and Jewish voters who want support of Israel.

Sarah (BBC Washington Bureau)

And it stops the Democrats talking about prices and affordability if they are arguing about Israel and whether or not to try and arrest Benjamin Netanyahu amongst themselves. Even if they're arguing about that with Republican opponents, it means they're not concentrating on the core issues that voters are most concerned about, which is the cost of living and the area in which Donald Trump is the most potentially vulnerable.

Anthony (BBC Washington Bureau)

Yeah. So you can see why Trump and Republicans want to make this an issue and why Trump certainly is leaning into this. Is there a reason why Mamdani might be willing to pick this fight as well? Part of it. The main reason we had to come out with this video was because of that magazine interview recently where he brought it up. Is there a political benefit from for him as well to give a public statement like this condemning Netanyahu.

Sarah (BBC Washington Bureau)

I mean, Zoram Hamdani represents a particular part of the Democratic Party, doesn't he? I mean, he is a member of the Democratic Socialists as well as the Democratic Party. And this is speaking very much to that base who have received him enthusiastically in New York. But it is untested yet as to whether or not this kind of politics that works so very well in the big city is going to work across America.

Anthony (BBC Washington Bureau)

Yeah, I guess one thing Mamdani doesn't have to worry about is ever running for president. He wasn't born in the United States. He's a naturalized citizen. So, you know, he doesn't have to worry about costing him an election down the road. But I think what he does want to be seen as is the leader of this progressive movement and maybe a kingmaker at some point and a more influence in national Democratic politics. And this is one way to kind of solidify those bona fides, maybe.

Sarah (BBC Washington Bureau)

Yeah. Now, Anthony, before we go, it's been a while since we did one of these.

Anthony (BBC Washington Bureau)

I pledge allegiance to the United States of America. I tell you, it does my heart good to hear the eagle's proud chirp.

Sarah (BBC Washington Bureau)

Yes. So the United States of America. We're building a map of our listeners state by state, and we want to hear from all 50 states. And today, for obvious reasons, we thought it was appropriate to hear from Arizona. So here is Roslyn from Essex.

Roslyn (Listener from Essex)

When I was 10 years old, my family lived briefly in a place called Tenpe in Arizona, and I went to elementary school there. I've been back a few times and still have some friends there. And it's really shaped my views of the U.S. pluto was discovered in Arizona and Arizonans were not at all happy when it stopped being a planet in 2006. So a couple of years ago, the governor actually signed into law Pluto being the, quote, state planet of Arizona. I think that is such a lovely way of working off the anger. Arizona was traditionally a very red state when I lived there. Very much cowboy, frontier country people there who actually just about remembered Arizona being a territory. Politicians tended to be quite libertarian, particularly on gun control. However, it's become increasingly purple in recent years. People have retired there in large numbers from elsewhere. It's dry and it's warm and it's cheaper than California. The end result, I'd say, is a much more diverse political scene, but I'd say also a very much more confrontational one.

Political Figure / Hearing Speaker

Still.

Roslyn (Listener from Essex)

I love Arizona. And it is clearly the best state in the union.

Sarah (BBC Washington Bureau)

Obviously you would agree with that, Anthony.

Anthony (BBC Washington Bureau)

You know, Arizona is lovely. I have family there. Both my parents went to school at state schools in Arizona. So I have some ties there. It's not Texas, it's not California, but it is. If you like the desert Southwest, if you like wide open spaces and dry weather and cactuses, it is the place for you. And I think Rosalind, in her voice note there, does touch on a lot of the things we talked about, how it's becoming a purple state, it's becoming more diverse, even though it has that conservative background.

Sarah (BBC Washington Bureau)

And it does, as she said, have that cowboy frontier country sense to it. And it's one of the states where I think it is possible to imagine people pushing west homesteading coming in their covered wagons. There's a romance, a huge amount of controversy obviously as well about how the west was won. But you can still feel a sense of that in some states. In Montana, where I was just on vacation a couple of weeks ago, and Arizona is another one of them where it does feel completely different from other

Anthony (BBC Washington Bureau)

parts of the U.S. yeah, my grandfather was very much a frontiersman. He and his wife, my grandmother lived on a Navajo reservation in Arizona for some time. They had one of those RVs they drove around. He did a whole bunch of different kind of cowboy things all over the state. So yeah, it's not that far removed from its Wild west days.

Sarah (BBC Washington Bureau)

So we still need to collect the rest of our United States of AmericaSt. So do please get in touch. You don't have to be in one of these states. You can tell us what your connection is, what's going on there, what matters on the ground, or even just a fun fact that we otherwise wouldn't know about that state. To do that you can email us@americastbc.co.uk or you can WhatsApp us with a message or a voice note. 44-332-3480 Bye bye bye.

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Thank you for answering our call and continuing to send your messages to us. We do read every single one. We love to hear your thoughts, your feedback and questions as well. So please do keep them coming. You can send us an email. It's americastbc co.uk the WhatsApp is 443-301-239480 and you can get involved in the AmericasT Discord server. The link to that is in the description and don't forget to subscribe. That way you will never miss an episode. Until next time Bye.

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