Poll: Despite booming economy, Arizonans feel the worst about their future out of 7 swing states
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Arizona's economy during the Biden administration has included massive investments in the semiconductor industry to historically low unemployment rates.
Eliza Collins says Arizona is booming.
Collins is a national political reporter for the Wall Street Journal based in Phoenix and reports that booming economy isn't making voters here feel any better about the trajectory of the state. In fact, in a new survey of swing state voters, the journal found 60% of residents here said Arizona is headed in the wrong direction.
Full conversation
LAUREN GILGER: Let's start with the state of Arizona's economy today. You say it's booming. Tell us, you know, the big, the big highlights here, right?
ELIZA COLLINS: So the Biden administration has invested really tens of billions of dollars into the semiconductor industry. You know that new TSMC plant going in, Intel has gotten money. The state has attracted a lot of private investment, record low unemployment or it's near record low right now. It has hit record low. We were experiencing inflation here of, of course, as is the rest of the country, but it has gone down significantly from its peak, which was 13%. Now, it's just about 2%. So economic markers look good for the state.
But voters here do not feel good. And really, that's because they, you can tell people that money is coming into the state. But when they go to the grocery store, if prices are still up, when it's still hard to buy a house, they're not feeling like Arizona is doing better, right?
GILGER: This is a narrative we're hearing kind of around the country, right? That voters are not feeling good about the the economy, even though the economy is pretty good by all measures. Talk a little bit more about the survey the Journal did here of likely voters in several swing states including Arizona. What are some of the standout findings to you? What surprised you?
COLLINS: Yeah. So Arizona is a critical swing state come November. It was the state with the tightest vote margin. So Arizonans elected Joe Biden by just over 10,000 votes. We know Arizona was a longtime Republican state that has become very competitive in the last several years. So it's one of seven swing states that we at the Wall Street Journal are watching to decide the election. So the poll went out in all seven states.
Arizonans felt the worst about the trajectory of their state compared to all of the other swing states. Now, I will say former president Donald Trump leads here in Arizona, and he led in all other states except one, all other battlegrounds. So, like you mentioned, this is a problem for President Biden across the country, this sort of disconnect. But in our poll, half of Arizona voters said the economy had gotten worse over the last two years, which is, of course, during Biden's tenure, even though there's been a lot of indicators that that actually is not the case.
Nearly three-quarters of people said it's more difficult for the average person to get ahead here. So people are feeling really poorly about their chances of moving forward, about their economic chances. They're also seeing headlines about immigration. There's been record surges at the U.S.-Mexico border under Biden and so when I was out, when I'm out talking to voters, those are the things they're talking about when deciding how they're going to vote in November, right.
GILGER: Let's talk more about that disconnect and what people told you like, what are the biggest economic factors people really hear or feel, right. Like you talked about the grocery store, gas prices. Are housing prices, a big part of what people are talking about.
COLLINS: Housing prices are very significant. For us Arizonans, you know, the state has grown so much in recent years and it's become really expensive. Realtor.com did an analysis for us and found that housing prices here have gone up 50% or about 50% since before the pandemic, which is a massive jump. Interest rates are obviously very high still. That's a problem across the country. So people feel like it's really hard to buy a house. They're expensive and on top of it, interest rates are high. So that was something that I was hearing from voters.
I talked to one voter who was sort of this a perfect example of all of this because he works in the semiconductor industry that is getting all of this money. His name is Earl. He was not seeing any of the money himself, right? His salary hadn't changed, the people around him hadn't changed. He was a Trump 2016 voter, a Joe Biden 2020, an undecided this cycle, and Earl talked about the cost of living. He said he bought a house last year, but he had to bring his budget down because the high interest rates and just what he could get was lower than he had thought. He mentioned having to make changes to his life. His vacations had changed. He was no longer flying to places, he was driving locally in state, he was going to the movies less. So, you know, these are choices that a lot of Arizonans have had to make and that was weighing on him and trying to decide who to vote for.
GILGER: And lastly, I want to ask you about this growth, right? Like the explosive growth just in people and in the economy here in Arizona sounds like a good thing on paper. But you talked in the piece about, about the state's growth, having some downsides for voters and maybe that the surge of new residents doesn't favor Democrats as well.
COLLINS: Yeah. So this is something we hear. I hear a lot from people that are not from Arizona, they say, oh, Arizona is getting blue. Arizona is not getting blue. Arizona is a state where Republicans and independents are the largest voting bloc basically depending on the month. The secretary of state's office. But both of those are well over a third, and then Democrats are about 30% of the state's electorate. That matches who's coming here. So Democrats have been able to win in Arizona because they've held Democrats together. They've overperformed with independents and they've peeled off about one in 10 Republicans, and that's the coalition that has been giving Democrats wins here. And so we're not seeing any major shift in people who are coming to the state. It almost matches the state's current makeup.
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