Ronald J. Hansen

The Arizona Republic

Republican vice presidential candidate Mike Pence’s two stops in Arizona on Tuesday brought some exposure to Donald Trump’s campaign, and it might have even swayed a few voters to support the GOP ticket.

But the Indiana governor's visit also was another chance to tap donors from one of the more generous states to the Trump campaign so far.

Scottsdale’s 85255 ZIP code is the No. 1 source of individual contributions to the Trump campaign in the nation, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks money in politics. That slice of Arizona had chipped in just under $30,000 through June.

Arizona is also generating whispers of becoming a competitive state in the fall, something that would defy decades of history and could signal a broader problem for Republicans.

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"They're running an unorthodox campaign. They had a weekend with no events and now you've got an event in Arizona," said Casey Dominguez, a political-science professor who researches presidential campaign finances at the University of San Diego. "The typical strategy at this point in the campaign is to maybe be a little bit more aggressive, maybe going into a place like Michigan rather than consolidating."

Overall, Arizona ranks seventh among the locations for publicly disclosed donors, with about $416,000, according to the campaign’s filings with the Federal Election Commission.

As might be expected, Washington, D.C., Texas, California, Florida, New York and Georgia are among the Trump campaign's strongest donors.

What might not be expected is the relatively slim support for him from residents in key states such as Ohio, Pennsylvania and North Carolina. They are seen as competitive politically and far more populous than Arizona.

North Carolina, for example, has more than 2 million more residents than Arizona, yet among donors who have sent Trump at least $200, that state has given about as much as those living in Arizona.

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Colorado, another important state for Republican hopes this year, has 5.4 million residents compared with Arizona’s 6.7 million. But that state has given about half as much to Trump as donors from Arizona.

And the money collected by Trump is a fraction of what Mitt Romney, the 2012 GOP nominee, raised here and elsewhere. Through the first six months of this year, Trump's campaign has raised about $13 million from publicly disclosed donors. By comparison, at the same point four years ago, Romney had taken in more than $94 million, FEC records show.

In Arizona, Romney had collected about $1.5 million from disclosed donors through June 2012, but he received more from 17 other states. Romney won Arizona by 9 percentage points.

Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee, has raised $1.7 million from Arizonans, and her former rival Sen. Bernie Sanders nearly matched her in Arizona. But both of those candidates have run conventional fundraising operations.

Trump largely funded his own primary campaign and has made fundraising a priority only in recent months.

Tuesday's swing through Tucson and Phoenix was Pence's first, but the Trump campaign's fifth visit in the past year. Arizona has voted for a Democrat only once since 1952. By contrast, Clinton was in Omaha this week in an effort to win an electoral vote in Nebraska, which allocates its electoral votes based on results in congressional districts.