Certainty is a wonderful thing. It is also distrusted, especially in politics, and especially after the past three weeks in the presidential race, in which there have been efforts Assassination Republican candidate Donald Trump and abdication of the presumptive Democratic candidate Joe Biden. So when I asked an ally of Kamala Harris The only question that really matters over the next three months—what does the abrupt shift from Biden to Harris mean for the races in the battleground states that will decide who wins the White House?—I was delighted to hear the answer: “Nobody knows.”
We do know a few things, though. One is that Harris insiders disagree with the conventional wisdom that quickly emerged after she replaced Biden: that having a black female candidate would make things easier in Sunbelt states like North Carolina and Georgia and more challenging in the crucial “blue wall” states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. True, more white male voters may have voted for Trump in the North and more black voters for Harris in the South than if Biden had remained the nominee. But Democratic candidates of all stripes have generally done better in blue wall states than they have in the Sunbelt. Still, early polls have been pretty encouraging. Before Biden abruptly dropped his reelection bid on July 21, Trump has gone ahead and expanded his polling lead in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Michigan, Georgia and Nevada. The first round of polls showed Harris beats Biden‘s support in the top four spots, plus Wisconsin.
Another predictable effect of the Biden-to-Harris switch and the explosion of donations and volunteers is that she could stretch the electoral map. Biden’s strategy would be to dig deep and defend Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. But Harris would also be fiercely competitive in Arizona, Georgia, and perhaps Nevada, forcing Trump to do the same. Just two weeks ago, for example, the former president appeared to be in a strong position in Georgia, which Trump infamously lost in 2020 by just 11,700 votes. Even LaTosha Brown, Brown, a co-founder of Atlanta-based Black Voters Matter, was frustrated. “I have a 25-year-old granddaughter who called the president ‘Genocidal Joe.’ We fought about it. I couldn’t move her,” Brown said. “When Kamala took over, my granddaughter called and said, ‘Where can I work?’” Her granddaughter wasn’t alone. Georgia has seen the largest number of new voter registrations of any swing state since Biden resigned, according to vote.org; nationwide, 162,000 people have registered, and 82% of them are between the ages of 18 and 34. An Emerson College poll of likely Georgia voters found Harris trailing Trump within the margin of error, essentially erasing the advantage she held over Biden. Harris’ campaign recently added three more offices in the state, bringing the total to 24, and on Tuesday the candidate spoke at a large rally, lively demonstration in Atlanta with the participation of Megan Thee Stallion, the kind of event that would have been unthinkable when Biden was still in the lead.
Harris’s most optimistic advisers believe she can expand the battleground map beyond the five consensus swing states. Dan Kanninen, campaign’s battleground state director, told me in March that he was optimistic about North Carolina. But a month ago, Trump held an eight-point lead in the 538-point average of polls, and the state increasingly looked like a hopeless target given Biden’s presumptive Democratic nomination. Barack Obama, in 2008, became the first Democratic presidential candidate in three decades to win North Carolina; strategist Cornell Belcher was part of Obama’s team at the time, and he saw North Carolina as the state Harris could make the biggest gains in. According to vote.org, North Carolina is second only to Georgia in new voter registrations since Biden’s announcement. “If you look at the Research Triangle [of Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill] and her ability, I think, to pick up a few points with white women, primarily college-educated white women, and do a few points better overall with college-educated voters,” Belcher said, “that’s the next state that’s going to change.”
His enthusiasm, however, was tempered by a sense of reality mixed with a sense of déjà vu. In 2012, again working for Obama, Belcher made a serious case for his re-election campaign. Mitt Romney in Georgia. “We did some polling, and we could have put the state in play,” Belcher says. “But then the number crunchers determined that Georgia was really expensive. And it wasn’t getting cheaper. We could have these hypothetical conversations, but at some point you’re going to run into the reality that, okay, North Carolina, Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, along with the traditional blue wall states—that’s a lot of money and organization.”
Meanwhile, Harris’s campaign is trying to ride the wave of adrenaline, cash hoards, and enthusiastic volunteers. Difficult choices about where to deploy those resources will come quickly after the Democratic convention, which is why her campaign leaders are focused on figuring out exactly which voters, in which parts of battleground states, can be persuaded the most. The key is not whether Harris can energize voters across broad categories, but whether she can boost Democratic turnout in specific places. Women in the Philadelphia suburbs, northern Virginia, Detroit, and Phoenix, among others, will likely see and hear a lot of ads highlighting Harris’s reproductive rights message and her theme of not allowing Republicans to take the country backward. In the runoff, much of Democrats’ time and money will likely be poured into a map that looks very similar to Biden’s, with significant investments in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, where women and black voters are seen as potentially decisive factors.
“She’s like a defibrillator for the Democrats in this race,” he said. John Anzalone, a pollster whose clients include Biden 2020 and Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer today. “What she’s doing right now with young people, African Americans, Latinos, AAPIs, college-educated women—it’s not just the grassroots coming home. We’ve got a whole universe of people who are not showing up. So it’s a double whammy. But it’s still early days.” There’s that admirable uncertainty again.
