As the presidential transition is underway, cabinet picks are announced and America and the world prepares for Trump 2.0, what are Southern Arizonans thinking about the choices voters made this November?
After months of covering a dramatic and at times turbulent 2024 election season, with Donald Trump heading back to the White House again, Arizona Luminaria reporters reached out to voters and residents to hear how people are understanding the results and readying themselves for the incoming administration.
Homemade voter guides
In the weeks after the election, Faffs Riederer was still struggling to kick their despondent feelings over the outcome. “I had some really down days. I’m still reeling about it,” they said.
Riederer, 45, voted for Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, but was also upset about the outcome of several local races. That includes the Arizona Corporation Commission, which regulates utilities in the state. Republicans won all three open seats on that board this election.
“I’m really concerned about the environment and energy, and I think the utility commission is one place that we can have an impact on that,” they said.
For the last nearly two decades, Riederer has had a specific engagement with electoral politics: for each election they have put together an online voter guide for their friends and community members.
They include information about local candidates, reference which elected officials have themselves made endorsements, and keep the document in suggesting mode on Google docs for anyone who wants to add their thoughts.
It’s given them a long view of how to make changes on housing and bike infrastructure, two topics Riederer considers particularly important.
“For me, voting is really important,” Riederer said. “It can have a big impact on our lives. But I also find it really alienating, like the language that we used to talk about politics often obfuscates, what’s really happening, or what the real impact of a thing would be.”
For those issues, Riederer says they are taking heart in the election of Democrat Jennifer Allen for the District 3 seat as well as the reelection of Gabriella Cázares-Kelly to county recorder.
Their advice for people feeling similarly despondent coming out of the election is to remember that voting is one action that happens every few years, but there are a plethora of more immediate steps to change the world that people can take every day.
“We still have to work on the things that we’re working on here, which is trying to make it work in our city, trying to get people housed, trying to make life a little better for our neighbors and our family,” Riederer said.
– Yana Kunichoff
“He felt safe here”
Isaias Carrillo, the owner of ’81 Barbers, spoke to Arizona Luminaria outside of the Donna R. Liggins Center in midtown Tucson just after casting his ballot on Nov. 5. A week later, sitting in his barber shop near the MSA Annex on Tucson’s west side, he said his first reaction to seeing the outcome of the election was anger.
“It was mostly frustration at my own party. I think the Democrats allowed the perception that the Republicans were the party for the working class, when they’re not,” Carrillo said. He added that the Democratic party needs to do a better job reaching out to middle class voters. “We need to open our arms to all these people,” Carrillo said.
In the days immediately following the election, the mood in his barbershop was somber. He said one client walked in after a few days of not seeing anybody, and then he came to get a haircut “because he felt safe here,” Carrillo said. “I want to maintain that feeling.”
He said he’s most worried about “civil rights and human rights in general.” He has family members, friends and business partners who aren’t citizens and he’s worried about what might happen to them. Other concerns Carrillo has are the basic rights of LGBTQ people, the possibility of redlining, and the future of the Supreme Court.
“The first time Trump won it felt like someone broke up with you,” Carrillo said. “This time it felt like a kick in the nuts.”
– John Washington
Not worrying yet
Ben stood outside the Winchester Heights Community Center, just north of Willcox, Arizona, during his work break from the fields.
Ben is an undocumented farmworker, and has lived in Southern Arizona for 14 years. Currently, he leads a team of ten other people, all without legal authorization to be in the United States, who work on a pistachio orchard.
While his legal status prevents him from voting and makes him a target of President-elect Donald Trump’s plan to deport people en masse, Ben said he’s not yet worried.
“One comes here to work and, thank God, we don’t have records, so you feel fine,” he said.
Ben lived through Trump’s previous term and is used to his anti-immigrant rhetoric. He said he’s not certain whether the future president’s words will translate into arrests of people like him.
“Why worry when we don’t know yet whether it’s really going to happen or if it’s just the news reporting it,” he said.
– Carolina Cuellar
“The people spoke”
Danny De La Torre attended Donald Trump’s final campaign rally in Tucson about two months before the presidential election. Donning a Latinos for Trump t-shirt, De La Torre told Arizona Luminaria at the time he was sure Trump would win.
Now that he has, De La Torre says he couldn’t be happier.
“I thought he would win easily so I wasn’t worried,” De La Torre told Arizona Luminaria over the phone on Nov. 21.
“This election was very important to me,” he said, adding that it was the first time he voted Republican and that he did so down the ballot. Locally, he said was interested in the Arizona Senate race but mostly paid attention to the presidential election.
De La Torre previously described himself as a former “full blood liberal” who voted for Biden in 2020 and Clinton in 2016. He began veering more conservative because of Democrats’ stance on abortion and the border, but that the final straw was what he called the “undemocratic switch from Biden to Kamala.”
“I think she (Harris) was just trying to say what was going to get her elected when it came to the guns, that was a big thing,” he said, adding that he believed a Harris administration would take away people’s guns.
De La Torre, who takes a pro-life stance on abortion, said he also believes Minnesota’s laws are extreme, which for him raised a red flag about Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as Harris’s running mate.
“It was all the way up to nine months and that’s wild to me, it’s barbaric, in my opinion,” De La Torre said.
Walz in early 2023 signed into law legislation codifying the right to abortion and other forms of reproductive healthcare in the state. While Minnesota’s law does not delineate a gestational limit on abortion procedures, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that in 2021 about 94% of abortions nationwide occur in the first trimester and less than 1% occur after 21 weeks.
In Arizona, voters approved a constitutional amendment guaranteeing abortion access up to fetal viability, typically after 21 weeks. It expands access to abortion beyond the state’s current 15-week limit.
“I mean, the people spoke,” De La Torre said of Prop. 139‘s passage. “A vote was put up for the people and the citizens of Arizona voted to pass it and I may not agree with it but I respect the process.”
Immigration was another topic that influenced the way De La Torre voted on Nov. 5. He believed border policy needed to be “cleaned up” and didn’t like how it was currently being managed.
“I think what the Biden-Harris Administration did by basically just opening up the gates and letting people flood in was a huge mistake and it’s gonna take a little bit to clean up,” De La Torre said.
During the Biden administration, over 3 million people were deported or removed from the country, which was on pace to match the 1.5 million deportations during Trump’s term in office. Asylum was also severely restricted this year under Biden, which was met with criticism by immigrant rights organizations
“I’m not against immigration. My parents and my aunts and my grandparents immigrated to the United States in the ’60s, before I was born, so I’m for immigration,” he said. “I’m for people coming here, but it’s gotta be done the right way, the rules got to be followed.”
“I hope that once he (Trump) gets in, the country realizes, especially the Left that didn’t vote for him and are having mental breakdowns because he got back into the office, I hope they realize it’s not as bad as what the media is making it seem or what the left media is making it out to be,” De La Torre said. “I think there’s a lot of fear-mongering going on and I think that’s why we see the reactions from a lot of the liberals kind of losing their minds a little bit.”
– Chelsea Curtis
Focusing on community and friends
Trinity Norris, a citizen of the Tohono O’odham Nation and graduate student at the University of Arizona, said tribal sovereignty was at the top of her mind when voting for Kamala Harris on Nov. 5.
Norris said Harris at least considered Indigenous people. She added that the Biden Administration also appointed Deb Haaland, a member of the Pueblo of Laguna, to serve as Secretary of the Interior – the first Native American to do so.
But now Norris fears tribal sovereignty and the consideration and representation of Indigenous people is under threat with Trump as president.
Norris said she was surprised Trump won, especially because Native voters in 2020 “helped steer” Arizona blue and secure Biden a win. “There’s just evidence that I don’t really think he (Trump) cares about protecting us Indigenous people,” she said.
She pointed to executive orders Trump signed during his first presidency in 2017 allowing the construction of the Dakota Access and Keystone XL oil pipelines — a move criticized by Indigenous people and climate change activists.
Locally and on Norris’s homelands of the Tohono O’odham Nation, she said, Trump expedited building the border wall, desecrating sites and burial grounds sacred to the tribe. Tohono O’odham Nation Chairman Ned Norris, Jr., wrote an article in late 2020 urging Congress to halt Trump’s border wall.
Norris said she was happy to see Gabriella Cázares-Kelly, also a citizen of the Tohono O’odham Nation, reelected as Pima County Recorder.
Norris said she was relieved the ballot measure, Prop. 139, extending reproductive rights in Arizona, was passed by voters. But with Trump as president, she worried even abortion rights in Arizona would also be under threat.
“Right now, I’ve just been focused on taking care of myself and my own mental being while we go through this,” Norris said. “Being with community, being around friends has really kind of helped me take my mind off everything.”
– Chelsea Curtis
Surprises on the way
Diana Anderson is a self-described legal nerd. She has spent the past few years immersing herself in the legal cases dogging former President Trump and members of his administration. In her view, there was no way a majority of the American people would vote for a convicted felon.
The election result, in which 52.2%, or 1.7 million people in Arizona, voted for Trump felt like a gut punch to Anderson.
“I had more faith in the American people, yeah, and I certainly had more faith in women because of the abortion issue,” said Anderson, who is 65. “There are women who basically ignored the suffering of their sisters.”
She is worried about the lives of immigrants in the U.S., but is also concerned many people aren’t considering what could be a broader impact on the industries that employ undocumented people.
“I choose to believe that people don’t know what is about to happen,” she said. “It’s going to affect employers who employ these people, because they’re going to be prosecuted.”
Anderson left her church community because of their conservative views. These days, she and her husband find their community online.
“It’s going to be a very small circle right now,” she said. “Social media is where there’s a lot of people who feel the same.”
– Yana Kunichoff
Civility amidst disagreement
Andy Gyarmaty, who cast his ballot on election day at Eckstrom-Columbus Library, said, “I was a little bit disappointed, but wasn’t overly distraught.”
“It’s not as dire as some people made it out to be,” Gyarmaty added. “The extreme right and extreme left get all huffy-puffy, but I’m a bit more of a moderate. Yeah I was disappointed, but life goes on.”
Gyarmaty said he was a bit worried about U.S. policy around Russia and Ukraine. He isn’t “a big fan of Project 2025 — a collection of conservative policy proposals, many of which are considered extremist — but some parts I think are alright,” he said.
Moving forward, Gyarmaty said he wants to do more research and become more knowledgeable about specific policies. “Both Fox News and MSNBC are slanted. I need to educate myself a bit more, beyond just getting the sound byte.”
He added that he knows people on either side of the political spectrum. “I’ve got a good enough relationship where there won’t be a dent. We can still hold civil, decent conversations even if we disagree.”
– John Washington
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