By the time Ted Cruz arrived Friday at the tiny border town of Douglas for his first Arizona event of 2016, he was already too late for the hundreds of thousands of Republicans who had already voted.

Election day is still two days away in Arizona, but well more than half of Republicans expected to vote in the state’s primary Tuesday have already cast their ballots — complicating Cruz's attempts to overtake Donald Trump as both make a late push for the state’s lucrative, winner-take-all prize of 58 delegates.


“A candidate cannot win Arizona if they don’t do well in early balloting,” said Nathan Sproul, an Arizona Republican strategist who served as co-chairman for Marco Rubio’s campaign in the state.

Arizona has among the most robust early-voting programs in the country. In Maricopa, the state’s largest county, the number of early voters in 2016 is already nearly 90 percent of the county’s total GOP turnout in the primary four years ago.

This raft of early voting represents a particular challenge for Cruz, whose team acknowledges he is likely climbing out of a hole, even though the campaign first put an Arizona team in place last September. John Kasich has all but written off the state, neither visiting nor investing resources, but the Cruz campaign is not getting a true head-to-head battle with Trump: Many votes were cast before the race consolidated, including for Cruz rivals who are no longer in the race.

In fact, veteran Arizona strategists and the Cruz campaign estimate as much as half the vote was cast before Marco Rubio dropped out on Tuesday.

“Trump would have a natural lead, because it’s a fragmented field,” Cruz campaign manager Jeff Roe, referring to the early vote, said the night of the March 15 elections.

Constantin Querard, Cruz’s Arizona state director, noted the campaign had gained momentum since Rubio dropped out but added, “We don’t know how much of a deficit we have to overcome.”

The outcome in Arizona is critical, not just for its bounty of delegates but also for its ability to reset the tenor and trajectory of the Republican nominating contest for almost a month. Arizona and Utah, where Cruz appears favored, vote on Tuesday, but the Republican race slows to a crawl after that, with only one other state voting in the following four weeks. That means either a Trump or Cruz sweep would linger in the news longer than any prior primaries.

Underscoring the urgency, Trump held rallies in the state’s two largest cities on Saturday, as he, like Cruz, turned his attention to the state late.

Public polling in Arizona has been scant, though Trump led Cruz by double digits in the two public surveys released this month. Internal polling from a Cruz super PAC, obtained by Politico, showed Cruz and Trump in a dead heat, even in a four-candidate race. In a survey conducted March 7-8, Trump led 25.5 percent to 23.8 percent, with Rubio and Kasich far behind, with 10 percent and 11 percent, respectively, and nearly 30 percent of voters undecided.

“We have more of an election month than an election day,” Querard said. “You have to pace yourself, but you have to go full speed as long as possible.”

He added of the pressure emanating from Cruz’s Houston headquarters: “They’re kicking the stirrups pretty hard.”

Arizonans are already voting at a record-setting pace. In Maricopa County, which includes the Phoenix area and accounts for 60 percent of Arizona’s total population, 249,702 of the 708,941 registered Republicans had returned their ballots as of Friday. Total turnout in the primary was about 280,000 in 2012. In Pima County, Arizona’s second largest and home to Tucson, more than 60,000 voters had cast ballots by Friday — roughly 85 percent of the 2012 turnout.

Yet none of the campaigns had registered much activity until days ago. Cruz’s campaign was the first to hit the airwaves, buying ads starting on March 12. One of his super PACs joined in recent days, as Trump opened his wallet to buy television ads, as well.

Cruz’s most recent Arizona ad tries to tap into voters’ fears of crimes committed by undocumented people crossing the border. It features the wrenching testimony of a father who says his son’s killing at the hands of an illegal immigrant was “completely preventable.”

“I trust Ted Cruz,” the father says.

Immigration is expected to loom large in a state where the topic has long dominated Republican politics. Trump, who has the support of controversial Sheriff Joe Arpaio and former Republican Gov. Jan Brewer, has made building a wall on the southern border his signature issue.

Last week, the Cruz campaign pushed back after POLITICO reported, in an outline of Cruz’s internal view of the path to getting 1,237 delegates to secure the nomination, that he would need to win Arizona. To reporters on March 15, Roe compared the Arizona dynamics to those in Louisiana, where they “won overwhelmingly” among election day voters but fell just short of overcoming Trump’s lead from early balloting.

The Cruz campaign hopes such a late surge could be portrayed as a victory, even if he loses all 58 of Arizona’s delegates. A memo from Cruz’s team on delegate strategy on March 15 said a multicandidate field in Arizona would effectively allow Trump to win.

Kasich mostly has been a nonpresence and nonfactor. “If he has a state chairman, I don’t even know who it is,” Querard said. (On Friday, after Querard spoke with Politico, Kasich announced his Arizona leadership team.)

Cruz’s campaign does have a program that identifies likely supporters and directs volunteers to make calls and knock on their doors. “There isn’t any other campaign that’s doing that level of engagement in Arizona,” said Sean Noble, an Arizona Republican strategist who previously supported Rubio. “I would have to put a slight advantage to Cruz because he has some presence here.”

Sproul, the other Arizona strategist, got his ballot early and has held it for weeks to see whether any campaigns would contact him. None did.

“I would have expected some of the campaigns to have at least done a few mail pieces, phone calls, a little bit of outreach,” he said. “It’s been remarkably quiet.”

Katie Glueck contributed to this report.