What’s driving the change in Arizona?

[Mr.Phips]

AZ electorate remains amazingly white(CVAP is a little under 80%), so it's fair to say the issue for Republicans is college/urban whites. Phoenix used to be competitive, now it's like D+20, Pima county used to be competitive, now just about every Dem this year got over 60%. Republicans don't have the same spark with the state's educated class like they used to.
Add in that Western rural areas aren't enough of a factor and the red suburbs are shifting left faster than they're netting votes for Republicans(like most of the country and not like Florida or Texas), you can see why the state has been voting the way it has.

There are a few things which are countertrends in Texas which differentiate it from Arizona. There are more people in rural areas and has many small to medium size cities which vote hard Republican. Cities that size in Arizona basically cancel out each others votes. There is also a big oil and gas industry here which rightfully feels attacked by the Democrats. Lots of possible votes for the Democrats are out of reach due to that reason. And finally, Texas was always more Republican than Arizona. Even in 2004 it only voted by about 10 points for Bush.

Texas is generally just a tougher carry for Dems because it is so much more diverse. In AZ, if you can do well in both Pheonix and Tucson, you've basically won the state. In Texas though, you have Dallas, Houston, Austin, San Antonio, Hidalgo, El Paso, and a few of the more mid-sized communities you mentioned and each one has a lot of very specific racial/cultural enclaves so if you're a Dem, you may have to fine-tune your messaging for differnet places which can be tricky.

A good example would be Austin v Houston. Austin is very much the stereotypical educated white liberal city where you need to be pushing for a lot of these more progressive beliefs. Houston on the other hand is very much dominated by the oil industry and has some more culturally conservative Hispanics and Asians that you need to figure out how to message too.

One of the biggest suprises in 2022 was how much Abbott improved over Trump in rural Texas; I already thought Rs were getting physically close to their ceiling but somehow Abbott got Trump 85%+ counties throughout the state to swing another 5 points to him. On net though, the rural areas have pretty stagnant growth so I think eventually the cities, especially Austin, will push the state to be more competitive. It's really a matter of time but it's hard to see Texas still being GOP leaning by the end of the decade without a re-alignment (which is very much possible).

There just isn't too much more the Republicans can squeeze out of the rural areas. I guess we keep saying that every time but at some point you reach a limit. In particular this will hurt the Republicans in the state house of representatives.

Rs geographical vote distribution in Texas is honestly terrible. You have a lot of wasted votes out of these Trump + 80 rural areas and high turnout Trump + 60 exurbs. Even though yes, there are some extremely lopsided areas in Ds favor, they are by and large low turnout with the excpetion of Austin.

I thought this was generally true in the Southwest and not specific to Texas?  However, R's held the AZ  legislature on a commission map and the congressional seats split 6R/3D while D's won most of the statewide offices, so IDK?

Republicans basically rigged the commission.  They made it so the Biden seats (AZ-01 and AZ-06) went for him by like .1%.  They did the same in the legislature where they made the 14th seats and 15th “Dem” seats(out of 30) seats that Biden won by very low single digit margins.