Aaron McDonald thinks back to when he came to Maricopa County nearly 20 years ago as a young ironworker hoping to get work building a new football stadium.

Driving in from Wyoming for the first time, he was struck by the overwhelming desert expanse that surrounded Phoenix.

Today, those sweeping vistas are dotted with industrial development that is transforming Arizona’s economy. A region that was devastated by the 2008 financial crisis is teeming with massive projects under construction, fueled in part by President Biden’s signature legislative accomplishments aimed at rebooting American semiconductor production.

“There was a shooting range there. It was the Wild West and now there’s a giant chip factory out there,” said McDonald, who now trains union ironworkers, referring to an enormous complex of plants being built in northern Phoenix by TSMC, the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. “The growth, to me, just really doesn’t seem like it’s gonna slow down at anytime. We know we have Biden to thank for this work.”

The question for Biden’s reelection team is whether enough voters in this battleground state will feel the same way in November.

His administration has awarded billions of dollars to companies such as Intel and TSMC and hopes that the enormous investments in green technology and semiconductors can make a difference in a state where Biden bested President Trump by a mere 10,000 votes in 2020.

But recent polling points to the challenges in winning over those voters.

The Inflation Reduction Act, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and the CHIPS and Science Act will ultimately send about $24 billion to Arizona, according to data compiled by the White House.

But a majority of Americans recently surveyed nationally said they didn’t know enough to say whether the Inflation Reduction Act helped or hurt them in the two years since its passage, according to recent polling from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. And a majority of registered voters in Arizona thought Trump was “more trusted” than Biden to address the economy and immigration, a recent Bloomberg/Morning Consult poll found.

TSMC has committed to spending $65 billion in the state building facilities in the next decade, on top of the roughly $11 billion in loans and grants it recently received from the U.S. Department of Commerce. The company has said its new facilities, when completed, will create 6,000 permanent and roughly 20,000 temporary jobs.

“When you drive to the north, or you drive to the south, you see what my wife calls the cranes of prosperity. And they are very prominent,” said Zachary Holman, an engineering professor at Arizona State University.

Intel is similarly expanding its footprint in Arizona, where it had been pulling back its presence as recently as a decade ago. It received about $10 billion from the Commerce Department, adding to the nearly $20 billion it plans to spend to expand its presence.

But with many of the new jobs arriving years in the future, more immediate concerns such as soaring rents, rising consumer prices and the crisis at the Arizona-Mexico border are capturing most of the attention.

Trump and his allies hope things stay that way, even as they wrestle with voter anger over the state Supreme Court decision banning virtually all abortions. The Legislature voted to undo the law with some Republican support.

“Arizona voters are ready to turn out for President Donald J. Trump this November,” said Rachel Lee, a spokesperson for the Republican National Committee. “Joe Biden is losing in the state, and he knows it. Despite Biden’s best attempts to gaslight voters, they know exactly who is to blame for soaring costs, a spiraling border crisis, and staggering crime rates across the country.”

Chandler Mayor Kevin Hartke makes remarks before President Biden takes the stage during his campaign stop in the city.

(Alexandra Buxbaum / Associated Press)

Advertisement

Kevin Hartke, the Republican mayor of nearby Chandler, said the investment in his city has been a godsend, while noting that it has been a bipartisan boost across multiple administrations — making it hard for Biden to own this growth exclusively.

“Your common person here is going to complain more about the cost of gasoline, the effect of inflation and certainly the housing crisis,” Hartke said. “I think those areas where there is more of ‘this hits me’ concerns as people struggle to keep up with those kind of growing prices.”

In addition to expanding semiconductor production, the money has gone toward renovating Phoenix’s airport, expanding the 10 Freeway through the region and planting more trees in the city.

“The last four years have been transformational for Phoenix,” said Mayor Kate Gallego, a Democrat. “We are going to have a more diverse high-wage economy for a generation because of Biden. My job is to help people appreciate the change we’re going through and how it means that they will have more opportunities to stay here.”

This showering of money didn’t seem to register for Gabi Zander, 34, who was at a recent farmers market with her mother in Phoenix’s Uptown neighborhood. Zander, who has lived in the area for more than a decade and works in marketing, said she is focused on the rising cost of living and the war in Gaza.

The recent ruling banning virtually all abortions in the state, since overturned, angered her. But the larger state of politics has her down and she’s unsure she’ll even vote.

“I just wish politicians would spend more time thinking about how to make the city more livable and get more funding for teachers,” Zander said. “I wish they would leave us alone.”

An Emerson College poll showed Biden trailing Trump in Arizona 44% to 40%, with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at 9%. A more recent poll from Data Orbital, a Phoenix analytics and survey firm, found Biden and Trump at 38% with Kennedy at 14%.

Steve Sherman, production engineering manager for Saras Micro Devices, it its new headquarters and production facility in Chandler.

(Ash Ponders / For The Times)

Advertisement

The Biden campaign has identified some combination of Arizona, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia as essential to the president’s reelection.

In 2020, Biden became the first Democrat to win in Arizona since President Clinton in 1996. The last Democrat to prevail here before that was President Truman in 1948.

The state has been a player in semiconductors for decades, with Intel’s presence dating back nearly 40 years.

Companies say they are able to produce these chips far more cheaply in places like Taiwan, South Korea and Japan, but the COVID-19 pandemic and emerging tensions with China have led government and private-sector officials to revive domestic production. This was the impetus for the $52-billion CHIPS and Science Act, which Biden signed in the summer of 2022. (CHIPS stands for Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors.)

Much of the money — $39 billion — will come in the form of grants and tax breaks to Intel and other companies. The other $13 billion will go to research and training.

Arizona was a natural destination thanks to its open spaces and affordable land, favorable business climate and the fact that many of these companies already had a presence in the region. Intel and TSMC had already committed billions to construct new manufacturing facilities before they received government grants and tax breaks in the last year.

“Some of these companies were starting to move” to the region, said Eelco Bergman, the chief business officer of Saras Micro Devices. “I think where things like the CHIPS Act helped is they took that spark and threw some kindling on the flame.”

This Saras Micro Devices space in Georgia is moving to Arizona because of benfits from the CHIPS and Science Act.

(Ash Ponders / For The Times)

Advertisement

Bergman and his partners have relocated their manufacturing facility to be close to Intel’s facility in Chandler. Saras is spending close to $200 million on upgrading a building and purchasing the equipment to produce components that can be sold to semiconductor manufacturers, Bergman said.

The business ecosystem is thriving, he added, because of heavy investment and being in close proximity to schools like Arizona State University, which graduates 7,000 engineering students a year. Intel hires more people from ASU than any other school in the country, and there’s a shortage of people skilled in the disciplines necessary to work in these industries, according to the company.

However the politics ultimately play out, the region has seen a monumental shift from an economy based in real estate and tourism into one heavily layered with future-facing manufacturing. Some of the investment predated Biden, but it was supercharged during his term.

“No one is getting total credit for the big picture of the success story … because it’s happened over such a long period of time,” said Rep. Greg Stanton, a Democrat and former Phoenix mayor. “The more interesting political question is, in the short run who gets credit for the United States finally having an industrial policy that’s been missing for such a long period of time where we finally respond to the challenge that is China?

“I think President Biden is going to get appropriate credit for that. Arizona has and will better benefit from the CHIPS and Science Act than any other state,” Stanton said.

Ironworkers like those McDonald is training are bouncing from job site to job site, watching outsize warehouses and manufacturing sites rise from the desert. The work is dangerous and can be chaotic, but it’s creating a future for people like Shawna Irwin, 25, who is originally from the Navajo reservation in northeastern Arizona.

Her late uncle — an ironworker — inspired her to enter the field. She later enrolled in a training program sponsored by the Ironworkers Local 75 and run by McDonald. The roughly four-year program — sometimes called the University of Iron — has ballooned to nearly 250 ironworkers who get supplemental training as they continue to work on job sites. McDonald would like to be training 500 ironworkers at the facility he manages by 2026.

“It opened a lot of doors for the unions,” Irwin said, “and for us there was a lot more work because of [Biden] funding the chip plants.”

TikTok, the popular social video app, sued the U.S. government on Tuesday, saying the country’s new law that could ban the app violates 1st Amendment rights to free speech.

President Biden last month signed into law a bill that would effectively ban the service in the U.S. if its Chinese owner, ByteDance, does not sell TikTok’s U.S. operations. Legislators backing the law said a ban or sale was necessary to address national security concerns posed by the app’s ties to China.

“There is no question: the Act will force a shutdown of TikTok by January 19, 2025, silencing the 170 million Americans who use the platform to communicate in ways that cannot be replicated elsewhere,” TikTok and ByteDance said in their filing, referring to the new law.

The Department of Justice declined to comment.

TikTok and ByteDance said in the court filing that it had been trying since 2019 to work with the U.S. government’s Committee on Foreign Investment to address security concerns. Under the terms of a deal spelled out in a 90-page draft agreement, data collected about Tik Tok users in the U.S. was to be handled by Oracle, the U.S. tech giant. The proposed agreement also called for Oracle to inspect TikTok’s programming code for vulnerabilities and for the platform’s content to be subject to independent monitoring, according to the filing in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. circuit.

If TikTok did not comply, the draft agreement called for the company to be subjected to financial penalties and also included the possibility of suspending TikTok’s operations in the U.S., the businesses said.

“The terms of that negotiated package are far less restrictive than an outright ban,” ByteDance and TikTok said in its filing.

But TikTok and ByteDance said it is unclear why the committee ultimately determined the proposed agreement was insufficient and in March 2023 “insisted that ByteDance would be required to divest the U.S. TikTok business,” according to the filing.

TikTok and ByteDance also noted the new law “offers no support for the idea” that TikTok’s Chinese ownership poses national security risks.

“Speculative risk of harm is simply not enough when First Amendment values are at stake,” the businesses said in their filing.

TikTok is still moving forward with addressing some of the security concerns by partnering with Oracle “on the migration of the U.S. platform and protected U.S. user data to Oracle’s cloud environment,” TikTok and ByteDance said in the filing.

As part of their lawsuit, TikTok and ByteDance are seeking a court order blocking the government from enforcing the new law.

“These are going to be difficult issues to thrash out,” said Carl Tobias, a law professor at University of Richmond.

Tobias said one of the challenges for TikTok and ByteDance is the government’s national security argument. “Federal courts tend to be pretty deferential to those kinds of assertions, especially from Congress,” Tobias said.

Other legal experts said that they believe TikTok has a strong case. Douglas Mirell, a partner at Greenberg Glusker, said that he suspects the government is going to have a significant burden of trying to prove the law is not unconstitutional under the 1st Amendment.

“If I had to choose which side of the case to be on, I would be on TikTok’s side,” said Mirell, who focuses on 1st Amendment issues.

TikTok is a hugely popular app, with more than 1 billion users worldwide and is a key part of the video creator ecosystem. Small businesses rely on TikTok to tout their products and video creators have moved to L.A. to be closer to its Culver City office. The company employs roughly 500 people in Culver City, according to city data.

In its filing, ByteDance argued that carving out TikTok’s U.S. operations from the rest of the company would not be feasible, in part because of the borderless nature of the social video app that allows for international content to be mixed in with U.S. videos.

“Such a limited pool of content, in turn, would dramatically undermine the value and viability of the U.S. TikTok business,” the filing said.

TikTok’s massive popularity — and value — is due in large part to the algorithm its developers designed that seamlessly feeds content to users based on what they have watched previously. TikTok and ByteDance said in its filing, the “Chinese government has made clear that it would not permit a divestment of the recommendation engine that is a key to the success of TikTok in the United States.”

Still, analysts said have predicted that some companies and private equity firms would be interested in buying TikTok even if the coveted algorithm wasn’t part of the deal. Potential buyers could include Oracle and Microsoft, said Daniel Ives, a managing director at Wedbush Securities in an interview with the Times last month.

Somewhere in my personal papers is a folded up, tattered poster of Mickey Mouse commemorating his long reign as the world’s most famous rodent. It shows scenes from some of his iconic shorts — “Steamboat Willie,” “The Band Concert,” “Brave Little Tailor” — above the legend “Thanks Mickey for 60 Years!”

Signed, Disneyland.

My fourth-grade classmates and I received the posters in the fall of 1988 at Patrick Henry Elementary School in Anaheim, along with a T-shirt of a tuxedoed Mickey wearing sneakers and a free trip to the Happiest Place on Earth for his birthday bash. We cheered alongside kids from around the world and rode rides until the evening. I can still hum parts of the gratingly cheery song from the parade held in Mickey’s honor. (A quick YouTube search confirmed I have the melody right.)

The poster hung on my wall through junior high, even though I was more of a Donald Duck fan. It was a symbol for me that a company whose products and productions I loved cared about us Anaheim kids. How cool was it that one of the world’s most popular theme parks was in my hometown? And how cool was it that they let us kids hang out with Mickey on his birthday for free?

I hadn’t thought about my souvenir for decades until yesterday, when the Anaheim City Council passed yet another Disneyland-friendly ordinance. Zoning regulations will be relaxed so Disney can build new attractions and hotels on its 490-acre campus, and three public roads will be sold to Disney for $40 million.

In return, Disney promises to undertake nearly $2 billion in construction over the next decade, donate $30 million to a yet-to-be-formed public housing trust run by Anaheim, give $8 million toward improving city parks and pay $45 million in “transportation improvements,” according to the website for DisneylandForward, the name Disney has bestowed on its plans.

A Disney-funded study by Cal State Fullerton’s Woods Center for Economic Analysis and Forecasting predicted that the company’s most ambitious proposals — a full build-out of Disneyland and Disney California Adventure, and a new hotel — will create tens of thousands of jobs and generate $244 million in annual tax revenue.

Who could possibly be against this windfall of cash and fun? Me, of course!

The Anaheim City Council unanimously approved the agreement despite the lack of concrete plans from Disney — all it’s revealing right now is “possibilities” inspired by attractions from its theme parks worldwide, according to the DisneylandForward website. There might be more specifics in the Woods Center forecast, but city officials and the public alike can see only a nine-page summary because Disney claims it contains proprietary information.

This cryptic Mouse long ago replaced the Mickey of my childhood memories. By the time I became a reporter, I knew that Disney has long treated Anaheim as a political chamois, looking to squeeze as much as possible out of Orange County’s largest city.

In 1996, the city paid for a $108.2-million parking structure — at the time, the largest in the world — that it leases to Disney for a buck a year, allowing the company to keep all the revenue and eventually assume ownership. A 2017 Times analysis found that Disney had “secured subsidies, incentives, rebates and protections from future taxes” worth more than $1 billion over the previous two decades. Disney has repaid that goodwill with millions of dollars in donations to political action committees that push pro-Mickey candidates.

Two years ago, FBI agents and city-funded independent investigators characterized a Disneyland Resort lobbyist as part of a “cabal” that has undue influence over city politics. Meanwhile, the cost of a one-day pass to the Mouse House has increased from $43 in 2000 to $194 as of last year. Nightly fireworks at the resort scare dogs, set off car alarms in working-class neighborhoods and make the 5 Freeway a smoky mess.

Yet, to paraphrase the most famous quote in “The Usual Suspects,” the greatest trick Disney ever pulled was convincing Anaheimers that its bad side doesn’t exist. The few DisneylandForward skeptics have been easily drowned out by supporters.

Unions? Leaders showed up to support DisneylandForward when the Anaheim City Council first voted on it in April. The council? From Republican Stephen Faessel to progressive Carlos Leon to independent Jose Diaz, they hardly asked any hard-hitting questions. The millions of visitors to the Disneyland Resort, half of whom seem to be my cousins and friends? They’re celebrating like Ewoks at the end of “Return of the Jedi” at the thought of more rides to enjoy and swag to grab.

Only a few of us cranks are pointing to the environmental impact report finding that the construction noise and permanent change in air quality as a result of the expansion would be “significant and unavoidable.” Or pulling out a calculator to crunch the numbers in the Woods Center report.

For instance, the study says that if Disneyland maximizes its acreage and builds a new hotel, that will create 28,352 jobs, translating into $1.8 billion in income for those employees.

Sounds nice and big. But it doesn’t say what kind of jobs and whether they’d be permanent or full time. The $63,487 average yearly salary from those jobs is considered low-income for a one-person household in Orange County, according to the California Department of Housing and Community Development. These are hardly the jobs Anaheimers need to be able to afford to live here, let alone live a good life.

I still remember when Anaheim was a city of factories and blue-collar jobs that allowed my immigrant elders and my cousins to buy homes. Near the granny flat where I lived before transferring to Patrick Henry were a lumberyard, a Kwikset factory and a trucking depot where my dad would pick up cargo containers.

All those places vanished decades ago. Now, there are hipster hangouts, beer gardens and high-priced apartments, because Anaheim leaders took Disney’s lead and transformed my hometown into one giant tourist trap, with longtime residents little better than an afterthought.

Which brings me back to that Mickey Mouse 60th anniversary poster. I eventually took it down because the edges were fraying, and I thought it would be a collectors’ item one day. I thought Disneyland had bestowed on me yet another wonderful prize.

I looked up the poster on eBay recently. I can get one for $20. But, hey: At least I got something free from Disney back in the day.

In 2016, the company vowed to give all Anaheim sixth-graders free Disneyland tickets in honor of its 60th anniversary if they did community service projects.

The promotion was supposed to continue for a decade but was discontinued in 2021, during the pandemic. It has yet to be reinstated, even though Disney just announced that its theme park division increased revenue in the second fiscal quarter to $8.39 billion.

Stay classy, Mouse House!