Vice President Kamala Harris’s entry into the presidential race against former President Trump has reset the political playing field in a major way, giving Democrats a promising boost in the polls and a significant infusion of cash and volunteers. But that didn’t change everything.
In a nation of more than 330 million people, the 2024 election, like the ones before it in 2016 and 2020, will almost certainly be decided by a relatively small number of voters in a handful of battleground states, political experts said.
When Hillary Clinton lost to Trump in 2016, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania combined received fewer than 80,000 votes. When President Biden defeated Trump in 2020, it was fewer than 50,000 votes in Wisconsin, Arizona and Georgia.
Now, Harris is in a high-speed race to launch her path to victory through the country’s battlegrounds, which include Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin — three of the “blue wall” states that lean Democratic — and Georgia, North Carolina and Arizona in the country’s Sun Belt. She is expected to choose a running mate this week, likely from one of those states, and begin holding major rallies in places like Philadelphia, Detroit, Raleigh, North Carolina, and Savannah, Georgia.
While campaigns are always trying to find the best path to victory, Harris’ campaign has cited polls showing she is closing the gap with Trump in almost every battleground, and seems more likely than Biden’s campaign. When asked if Harris might focus on the Blue Wall or the Sun Belt, her campaign’s response was both.
Harris speaks at a black community meeting in Houston last week. One expert believes her campaign will also take advantage of voter turnout in the South to keep Donald Trump on the defensive even in red states.
(LM Otero/Associated Press)
On a call with reporters last week, campaign field director Dan Cannin said the outpouring of support for Harris across the country included 360,000 new volunteers and $200 million in donations in the first week of her candidacy, accounting for two-thirds of the total number of new donors.
On Friday, Harris’ campaign said it had $377 million in cash on hand, compared with Trump’s $327 million, and would spend hard and fast to step up the fight.
Kannin said the campaign will quickly expand an already large network of Biden-Harris field offices and volunteers in battleground states. He said there are 600 staffers “in the blue wall” and another 150 will be added by mid-August. Aides also planned to double the number of campaign teams in Arizona and North Carolina and open new field offices in Georgia.
Volunteers have been knocking on doors and receiving training on how to improve online conversations in support of Harris.
“We’re making these investments across the map because the data is clear: We have a long way to go to get to 270 electoral votes,” Kanninen said. “The vice president is strong in both the Blue Wall and the Sun Belt, and we’re doing well in both.”
The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment on its strategy for the warring states.
In the American electoral system, voters cast ballots to elect a president, but the candidate who receives the most votes nationally is not necessarily the winner. For example, Clinton received about 2.9 million more votes than Trump and still lost.
This is because the candidate who receives the most individual votes in a state receives all of that state’s electoral votes in what is called the electoral college. The number of electoral votes in a state is determined by population, with more populous states, such as California, receiving the most.
To win an election, a presidential candidate must secure 270 electoral votes, and different presidents have gotten there in different ways. Barack Obama assembled a broad coalition of voters to turn nine previously red states blue in 2008.
Clinton appeared confident heading into the 2016 election and led in polls in her favor, only to have her campaign strategy (she never ran in Wisconsin) criticized by some political analysts after they mocked her shocking loss. In 2020, Biden was able to reverse some of the damage done to the Democratic Party, taking back several key battleground states while sweeping Arizona and Georgia, but by a narrower margin and on a narrower path to victory than Obama did in 2008 and 2012.
Political experts, pollsters and other veterans of the presidential race said that given Harris’ resources, it would make sense for the campaign to cast a wide net and fight in as many swing states as possible. But they have different ideas about how she can get to 270 or fall short.
Robert Alexander, a professor of political science at Bowling Green State University in Ohio and author of “Representation and the Electoral College,” has long studied presidential ways of winning the electoral map.
“Harris’ entry changed the color of the states to capture, I would say, from where Biden was, and that made it more favorable to the Democrats. It seemed like some states were going to disappear. [under Biden]“And some of the early polls say they are now back on the Harris-led ticket,” Alexander said. “That’s a significant shift in a very quick cycle.”
He said Pennsylvania, with 19 electoral votes, which Clinton lost and Biden won, was “a very key state in all of this” and that “money” would undoubtedly be spent on the election campaign there.
But he also expects Harris, full of new energy and enthusiasm, to take advantage of the Southern turnout, in part putting Trump on the defensive as he prepares to “win” Biden’s comeback.
Kyle Condick, a political analyst at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, said both Harris and Trump are focused on seven states that were decided by 3 percent or less in the last election: Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin in the blue wall; Georgia, North Carolina and Arizona in the Sun Belt; and Nevada.
In 2020, Biden won six of seven, while Trump took North Carolina, all of which are up for grabs in 2024, Condick said.
Before Biden left, Kondick had watched the president’s numbers in blue wall states decline rapidly, and he saw that decline as a death knell for the Biden campaign. “If he lost any of them, he wouldn’t win,” Kondick said.
He said that’s likely the case for Harris, but that could change if her numbers rise in North Carolina and Georgia.
“The jury is out on that,” he said.
This colorful endorsement of Harris recently emerged in Madison, the capital of Wisconsin. The critical situation helped Trump win the presidency in 2016 and lose it in 2020.
(Kayla Wolfe/Associated Press)
Cornell Belcher, a pollster who worked on both Obama campaigns, said Harris failed to rebuild Obama’s broad coalition. But it makes “perfect sense” to follow Obama’s strategy of “pushing expansion” across the electoral map, he said: “more places to go and more Republicans playing defense.”
Harris will have to “protect the blue wall, make stops,” Belcher said, and will certainly focus and spend time in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
But given his campaign coffers, he said, he also has “an opportunity to go on the offensive” in other vulnerable areas.
Belcher said North Carolina, which Obama turned blue, recently elected a Democratic governor, Roy Cooper, and could see a drop in Republican turnout as GOP primary voters choose far-right candidates.
“It’s absolutely an opportunity if you have the resources,” he said of Harris’ campaign. “And again, they have resources.”
Georgia also benefits from “a well-educated and upwardly mobile population and a growing segment of minority voters,” who turned both of the state’s U.S. Senate seats blue in the last election, he said.
“For Democrats not to take advantage of these changing dynamics within these states,” Belcher said, “would be a misstep.”
Harris doesn’t have much time left, but Belcher and others said how important it is. The race has moved at lightning speed, with electoral trajectories shifting rapidly in several states over the past two weeks, and Harris’s favorability rating has skyrocketed after Biden’s endorsement in record time.
“We’re in uncharted waters,” Belcher said. “There are no road maps for all of this.”
Alexander, of Bowling Green, said he still believes Harris has a “more difficult path” to victory because of the nature of the electoral college system, and is concerned that 2024 could be another “wrong election” with Trump relying on the electoral college to win despite Harris winning the popular vote.
“At one time,” Alexander said, “it was seen as a constitutional crisis.”
