Ahead of the start of early voting in the battleground of Arizona, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA), alongside Rep. Ann Wagner (R-MO), spoke to pro-Trump phone bankers about the importance of early voting. Reps. Byron Donalds (R-FL) and Cory Mills (R-FL) were scheduled to attend the event but canceled due to Hurricane Milton being expected to hit their home districts. 

“When we started working with President Trump talking about [early voting], he said, ‘We’re going to build the largest grassroots organization the country has ever seen,’” Scalise recalled. “So we can go into communities that we haven’t been able to reach before to encourage people to get out and vote like we’ve never seen before.” 

“We will overwhelm them with the vote this time around,” the Louisiana Republican added.

Early voting begins Wednesday, Oct. 9, in Arizona, a practice Arizona voters have utilized for decades. During the 2020 election, Trump did not support early voting as he viewed it as fraudulent, but in his third presidential campaign, he has urged his supporters to utilize the practice.

The chairwoman of the Arizona Republican Party, Gina Swoboda, and Republican congressional candidate Abe Hamadeh opened up the event. Speaking with the Washington Examiner, Hamadeh emphasized Arizona’s importance in this election. 

“Having the majority leader of the House … come out shows you how important Arizona really is,” Hamadeh said.

Arizona’s 8th Congressional District, where Hamadeh is running, has the highest population of seniors in the state. He said residents often tell him they cannot afford groceries or pay for their lives off of Social Security alone.

“They admit to me — you know, it’s so sad. These are people in their 70s — they admit to me that they have to go to churches, to go to food banks to get food. That’s not where we should be as Americans,” Hamadeh said. “They’re sick and tired of being treated as second-class citizens.” 

A recent AARP poll showed Trump up 2 points in Arizona over Vice President Kamala Harris, but the state is currently a toss-up among seniors, with the former president polling just 1 point ahead with voters 65 and older. Hamadeh said he was “not surprised” by those numbers in the poll. 

“In my primary race, we saw similar numbers as well; I think that’s pretty typical. It seems to me that people over the age of 65 too often watch the media a lot more closely. I think they have a little more trust in the media so that narrative that Kamala Harris is putting out, you know, these ads that we get bombarded with in Arizona, but right behind her is Trump’s border wall,” Hamadeh said. 

Border security was a top theme throughout the event. Arizona shares nearly 400 miles of its border with Mexico. 

“Especially here in Arizona, the border crisis is the No. 1 issue,” Scalise told reporters, pointing to fentanyl overdoses and crime.

Hamdedah also said the border was one of the most pressing issues in his district.

“How can we be a country when we don’t have a secure border?” Hamadeh questioned. 

“We have fentanyl coming in, we have communist Chinese coming in,” Hamadeh continued. “Which concerns me, especially my district, because we have all these Taiwanese companies moving into the district, so it’s a hotbed for intelligence activity.”