Arizona election results: Lifeline for Joe Biden as he wins state

Democratic candidate flips southwestern GOP stronghold that Trump carried by three points in 2016

Joe Biden will receive Arizona’s 11 electoral votes as the Democratic presidential candidate carries a state that Donald Trump won by more than three points in 2016.

The former vice president has won the state with roughly 52 per cent of the vote, according to the Associated Press, which called the race moments after the president said he “will be going to the US Supreme Court” to “stop" votes, as millions of ballots are still being counted in critical battlegrounds.

His premature declaration of victory followed his opponent’s slight Electoral College lead at 236 votes to the president’s 213 early on Wednesday morning.

Former astronaut Mark Kelly also has ousted Arizona’s incumbent Republican Senator Martha McSally, as Democrats take aim at collecting a majority in the US Senate.

Mr Kelly, who is married to former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, will be one of two Arizona Democrats in the Senate, filling a seat once held by former GOP presidential candidate John McCain.

The late senator’s wife Cindy McCain backed Mr Biden in the 2020 race.

Mr Biden and Kamala Harris, joining the candidate in their first appearance since she was introduced as his nominee, appeared together in the state early last month immediately following the campaign’s tour through Pennsylvania to launch his return to in-person campaigning.

Their stop in America’s southwest warned against GOP threats to healthcare and the economic toll of the coronavirus pandemic and the administration’s failures during the public health crisis.

Mr Trump’s three-point victory in Arizona in 2016 followed several years of the border state’s central role in Republicans’ anti-immigration efforts, with a groundswell of GOP support, from controversial sheriff Joe Arpaio to the late Senator McCain, the party’s 2008 nominee.

The president hosted several campaign rallies in the state in the run-up to Election Day, but key Democratic victories in the state’s larger counties – Maricopa, which hosts Phoenix, and Pima, which hosts Tucson – ensured a Biden win.