Could this group of voters help determine the outcome of elections in Arizona?

A campaign is underway to encourage the tens of thousands of immigrants in Arizona who have become naturalized U.S. citizens since the last presidential election to vote next November.

The campaign is part of a larger effort targeting battleground states where so-called "new American voters" could make a difference in deciding who will win the presidential election.

Joe Biden won Arizona in 2020 by less than 10,500 votes over Donald Trump.

The roughly 62,000 immigrants in Arizona who recently became naturalized U.S. citizens and therefore eligible to vote have the power to tip the election, said Nicole Melaku, executive director of the National Partnership for New Americans, during a recent news conference at the state Capitol. Her organization is a nonpartisan coalition of 70 immigrant rights and labor groups. Their estimate of new American voters in Arizona since November 2020 comes from the U.S. Immigration Policy Center at the University of California San Diego.

Candidates running for elected office need to pay attention to issues important to new American voters, she said.

"New American voters are represented and interwoven into all aspects of our society," Melaku said. "They're multi-ethnic, multiracial, multi-generational, and we are saying that we don't want to leave any of our voices on the table this November."

Melaku cited immigration, reproductive rights, global conflicts and climate change as key issues for recently naturalized U.S. citizens.

Campaigns aimed at getting candidates to pay attention to new American voters face an uphill battle, said Francisco Pedraza, a professor at Arizona State University in the School of Politics and Global Studies.

Candidates may overlook naturalized immigrants because so much political focus now is on the U.S.-Mexico border and the recent surge of asylum seekers entering the country, he said.

Even so, Pedraza said, the campaign's focus on turning out recently naturalized voters in battleground states such as Arizona, Nevada, Georgia and Pennsylvania makes strategic sense because their numbers in those states could help decide the outcomes in tight races.

"When there's that many people, and you're in a state where the outcome in statewide contests could be the difference of fewer than 20,000 votes, yeah, you can totally make a difference," Pedraza said.

But new American voters are not a monolithic group that votes the same, he said. They come from different backgrounds and political affiliations, he said. Elections are also not won by a single group, whether it be "soccer moms, or Latinos or disaffected noncollege educated white male voters," to name a few, he said.

Rather, elections are won by stitching together coalitions of different demographic groups, he said.

"There are ways that you can interpret the election results to give credit to any one particular group," Pedraza said. "It takes a combination, of course, of all these groups for a candidate or a campaign to be successful."

Naturalized U.S. citizen voters tend to be ignored by candidates because they tend to vote infrequently and at lower rates than voters born in the U.S. and they also tend to be voters of color, according to a 2022 report by the National Partnership for New American Voters.

Amritha Karthikeyan, an immigrant from India, became a naturalized citizen in 2022. In November, she plans to vote in her first U.S. presidential election.

She is also involved in trying to get recently naturalized citizens to vote in November — or register to vote if they haven't already — through the group Arizona Asian American Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander for Equity, where she is an intern.

Exercising the right to vote is important not only for oneself but also for people in one's community, said Karthikeyan, who expected to graduate this month with a bachelor's degree from ASU.

In addition to immigration and abortion access, Karthikeyan said employment and fair wages are issues that resonate with recently naturalized voters.

Razia Shalizi, 24, was born in Pakistan and grew up in Afghanistan and Pakistan. She came to the U.S. in 2018 as a refugee and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2023. She plans to register to vote so that she can take part in the general election in November.

"I do plan to vote this year," Shalizi said.

She said she is still learning about the U.S. political system and hasn't formulated an opinion yet on many issues, but women's rights and access to affordable education, especially for immigrants, are her top concerns.

Shalizi is a member of the Service Employees International Union, one of the groups supporting the New American Voter Campaign. She works at a Marshalls distribution center warehouse where most of the workers are immigrants or refugees who need access to education to improve their lives.

"Many of my associates, they don't know how to write, they don't know how to read, so it's really hard for them," said Shalizi, a business student at Glendale Community College.

Alex Jurua, 25, was born in the Republic of Congo and came to the U.S. in 2019 as a refugee after spending most of his life in a refugee camp in Uganda.

He is now a legal permanent resident and hopes to become a naturalized citizen in time to vote in the November general election.

He said immigration is the most important issue, and he wants America to continue to be a country that welcomes immigrants and refugees.

"I'm still getting to know the candidates" to learn which one "is willing to support us, to help us," Jurua said.

Reach the reporter at daniel.gonzalez@arizonarepublic.com.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Could these voters help determine the outcome of elections in Arizona?