Why the Blue Wall Looms So Large. The Atlantic - Politics by Ronald Brownstein

Aug 22, 2024 at 8:21 PM//keep unread//hide

American politics over the past generation has experienced the equivalent of continental drift. The tectonic plates of our political life have shifted and scraped, toppling old allegiances and forging new demographic and geographic patterns of support. The turmoil has shattered and remade each party’s agenda, message, and electoral coalition. And yet, no matter what else changes, the most direct path to the White House always seems to run through a handful of blue-collar states in the nation’s old industrial heartland.

This year is no exception. Strategists in both parties consider Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin the pivotal states that are most likely to decide the winner in 2024—just as they did in 2020 and 2016. Although taking this trio of Rust Belt battlegrounds is not the only way for Vice President Kamala Harris to reach the necessary 270 Electoral College votes, “if you look at the history of those states … then you have to believe they are the fastest way to get there,” says the longtime Democratic operative Tad Devine, who managed the Electoral College strategy for the Democratic presidential nominees in 1988, 2000, and 2004. Republicans consider those three states equally indispensable for Donald Trump.

If Harris can sweep Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, which offer a combined 44 Electoral College votes, and hold every state that President Joe Biden won by three percentage points or more in 2020, and win the congressional district centered on Omaha in Nebraska (one of two states that award some of their electors by congressional district), she would reach exactly the magic 270 votes. In turn, even if Trump sweeps all four of the major Sun Belt battlegrounds—North Carolina and Georgia in the Southeast, and Arizona and Nevada in the Southwest—he cannot reach 270 without carrying at least one of the big three Rust Belt states (unless he achieves a major upset in one of the states that Biden won last time by at least three percentage points).

The priority on Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin is evident in both the time and the money that each campaign is expending there. Both sides are bombarding these states with personal appearances and television advertising: Pennsylvania ranks first, Michigan second, and Wisconsin fourth (behind Georgia) in the ad-spend total, at more than $200 million so far for the three states, according to figures from AdImpact. And for the Democrats gathered in Chicago, Harris’s prospects in the three Rust Belt states is a perpetual topic of discussion, excitement, and anxiety.

“Let me just say, in conclusion,” former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told the Michigan delegation at the convention yesterday morning. “No pressure: The future of the nation is riding on you.”

[Ronald Brownstein: How the Rustbelt paved Trump’s road to victory]

Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin were a significant part of what I termed in 2009 the “Blue Wall”—the 18 states that ultimately voted for the Democratic presidential nominee in all six elections from 1992 through 2012. That was the largest bloc of states consistently won by the Democrats over that many elections since the formation of the modern party system in 1828. The 2016 election broke that pattern: Trump won the presidency by dislodging the big three of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin from the Blue Wall by a combined margin of about 80,000 votes. In 2020, Biden reclaimed all three—and with them, the White House—by a combined margin of nearly 260,000 votes.

Charles Franklin, the director of the Marquette Law School Poll, has calculated that in both 2016 and 2020, Wisconsin was the tipping-point state that provided the 270th Electoral College vote (first for Trump and then for Biden). Priorities USA, a leading Democratic super PAC, projects that Pennsylvania is the most likely such fulcrum this year. Perhaps because of this tipping-point effect, my term Blue Wall has morphed into a shorthand for these crucial states—even though they were simply the three bricks that fell out of the rest of the wall in 2016.

At a breakfast meeting of the Pennsylvania delegation that kicked off convention week in Chicago on Monday, speakers talked about defending the Blue Wall across Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin against Trump as urgently as characters in Game of Thrones would discuss fortifying the Wall in the north against the White Walkers.

“It is no secret; we are the keystone state of the Blue Wall,” Sharif Street, the Pennsylvania party chair, said. “As goes Pennsylvania, so will go America.”

A little later, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, Harris’s vice-presidential nominee, popped into the meeting with a similar message. “I just came from the Wisconsin breakfast, and the Blue Wall is solid, people,” he told the large crowd in a hotel ballroom.

Another special guest, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, dwelled on the topic. “Can we all agree we are going to be the Blue Wall again in 2024?” she asked. “Thank you for helping to save the world with us a few years ago. Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin: This race once again is going to come down to our big states.”

[Franklin Foer: Kamala Harris settles the biggest fight in the Democratic Party]

Before these states became the three-headed decider in presidential elections, campaigns usually considered Ohio—a demographically and economically similar neighbor—to be the tipping-point state. Early in the 1988 presidential race, I interviewed Lee Atwater, the legendary GOP strategist who was running George H. W. Bush’s campaign, and he told me that the campaign’s entire Electoral College strategy was to lock down so many states that Democrat Michael Dukakis could not reach 270 without winning Ohio, and then to defend Ohio with what Atwater called a “gubernatorial” level of campaign spending.

Sixteen years later, Karl Rove, the chief strategist for George W. Bush’s reelection campaign against the Democrat John Kerry, likewise considered Ohio “the key state,” he told me this week. Bush eventually won a second term (by the second-narrowest Electoral College majority for a reelected president ever) when he outstripped Kerry in Ohio by about 120,000 votes.

The state remained vital for Barack Obama, who carried it in both his 2008 and 2012 victories. But since then, Ohio has moved solidly toward the Republican Party, which has established overwhelming advantages in the state’s small towns and rural areas. Ohio no longer functions as a fulcrum in the presidential race; it is no longer even a state that Democrats contest at that level.

As Ohio has faded, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin have together filled its former pivotal role in presidential contests. An earlier generation of political analysts and operatives viewed Ohio as decisive partly because it seemed to capture America in miniature, due to its racial, educational, and economic mix and rural/urban makeup. Yet that microcosm thesis doesn’t explain the prominence of the new big three. Demographically, the states are not all that representative of an America that is inexorably growing more diverse: All three are whiter and older than the national average, with a lower proportion of college graduates and immigrants, according to census figures. The national trends regarding educational attainment and ethnic diversity that have unfolded in many other states, especially across the Sun Belt, have evolved much more slowly in the big three Rust Belt states.

In particular, white voters without a college degree, who fell below 40 percent as a proportion of the national vote for the first time in 2020, according to census data, still cast about half the vote in Michigan and Pennsylvania that year and nearly three-fifths of it in Wisconsin, according to calculations by William Frey, a demographer at Brookings Metro, a center-left think tank. Voters of color, who in 2020 cast about three of every 10 votes nationally, constituted only about one in five voters in Michigan, one in six in Pennsylvania, and one in 10 in Wisconsin.

[Derek Thompson: The new law of electoral politics]

If these Rust Belt battlegrounds still wield great influence in presidential races without being representative of the country overall, what explains that continued prominence? Experts I spoke with offered three persuasive explanations.

One is that a critical mass of voters in these states are conscious of their fulcrum role and therefore devote more attention to presidential contests than most voters do elsewhere. Rove likens the role that Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin now play in the general election to the part that Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina have typically played as the early states on the primary calendar. “There may be something to be said for them taking their roles seriously,” Rove told me. “Like, ‘We are going to pay a little bit more attention to this, and our politics are going to be slightly more robust.’”

Another explanation for these states’ central role is that they have remained highly competitive in presidential elections when so many other states “have made a very rapid transition,” as Rove put it, into the camp of one party or the other. Mark Graul, a GOP operative who ran George W. Bush’s Wisconsin campaigns, told me that the Rust Belt battlegrounds have remained so close because, within them, all of the big political changes over the past generation have largely offset one another. For example, although Democrats are benefiting from better performance in the growing white-collar suburbs around such cities as Philadelphia, Detroit, and Milwaukee, those gains have largely been matched by increasing GOP margins among the substantial small-town and rural portions of these states. In the long run, Graul told me, Republicans won’t be able to sustain that trade-off, because their strongholds are either stagnant or losing population. For the near term, though, these states “have been able to weather the demographic and geographic voting shifts and still remain incredibly closely divided,” he said.

The third explanation—identifying perhaps the most important dynamic at work—centers on these states’ powerful tendency to move together in elections. The big three have voted for the same party in every presidential election since 1980, with the sole exception of 1988 (when Wisconsin went with Dukakis, while Michigan and Pennsylvania backed Bush). Even more remarkably, in this century the same party has controlled the governorship in all three states simultaneously, except for one four-year period when Democrats held Pennsylvania while the other two elected Republicans.

Devine told me that because of the demographic and economic similarities and their proclivity for moving in tandem, the three states should be “considered a single entity,” which he calls “Mi-Pa-Wi.” With its 44 combined Electoral College votes, Devine said, Mi-Pa-Wi is in effect the last true swing state of that size, given that the states of comparable magnitude—California, New York, Florida, and Texas—all tilt solidly blue or red. “These three states are really one big state that is going to decide the election,” he said.

[Read: The DNC is a big smiling mess]

On paper, that should be an ominous prospect for Democrats in the Trump era. The foundation of Trump’s electoral coalition is non-college-educated white voters—and they constitute a significantly larger share of the vote in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin than they do nationally.

Yet, at their national convention this week, Democrats from these states clearly feel more optimistic about their prospects now than they did when Biden was the presumptive nominee. “I think this race has been reset,” Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor, Josh Shapiro, told me after the delegation breakfast on Monday. A recent survey from the New York Times/Siena College poll showed Harris with a four-percentage-point lead over Trump in all three states. Other surveys have shown the two candidates more closely matched, but almost all polls show Harris gaining.

Her revival builds on the larger trend across the region. After Trump’s upset victories in 2016, Democrats have regained the initiative in all three states. In 2018, each of them elected a Democratic governor; then each backed Biden in 2020; and in 2022, all three elected Democratic governors again—in every instance by a larger margin than in 2018. Democrats now also hold five of their six U.S. Senate seats.

The winning formula for Democrats in all three states has been similar. Although the party has rarely captured a majority of working-class white voters, its winning candidates—such as Whitmer, Shapiro, Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers, and Biden in 2020—have routinely performed a few points better with those voters than the party does elsewhere. Democrats have also posted huge advantages among young people, especially in such college towns as Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Madison, Wisconsin. And in all three states, Democrats are benefiting from expanding margins among college-educated voters in the suburbs of major cities—an advantage that widened after Dobbs, the 2022 Supreme Court decision overturning the constitutional right to abortion. (Later that year, Whitmer, Shapiro, and Evers each won about three-fifths of college-educated white voters: a crushing margin that improved on Biden’s performance, according to exit polls.) These formidable gains with white-collar voters have enabled the party to withstand disappointing turnout and somewhat shrinking margins among Black voters in Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukee, and other midsize cities.

Democrats hope that Harris can reverse that electoral erosion in Black communities, while expanding the party’s advantages in well-educated suburbs, especially among women, and recapturing young people who had soured on Biden. Her biggest challenge in the region will be holding as much as possible of Biden’s support among older and blue-collar white voters, who are probably the most receptive audience for the coming Republican attack ads claiming that Harris is a “woke” liberal extremist who is soft on crime and immigration.

Dan Kildee, a Democrat who is retiring after this session as the House representative of a district that includes Flint, Michigan, told me that this sort of hard-edged message will find an audience among some working-class white voters, but he believes Harris can keep those losses to a manageable level. “There’s a whole segment of that cohort of the electorate that now has evidence of what a Donald Trump presidency looks like,” Kildee said, “and will weigh that against the more hopeful and optimistic message that Vice President Harris brings.”

The margin is very tight: Even if Harris does everything right, an optimal outcome for her in these states might be winning them by one or two percentage points. Shapiro could have been speaking about all three states when he told reporters on Monday: “You can get to a race that’s sort of basically statistically tied, and getting that last point or two in Pennsylvania is really, really tough.”

But unlike what happened in 2016, when Hillary Clinton famously, fatally, took her eye off Michigan and Wisconsin to focus on campaigning elsewhere, Democrats are singularly focused on cementing Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin back into the Blue Wall. At the Pennsylvania breakfast, Whitmer told the delegates: “Josh [Shapiro] and I and Tony [Evers] are talking about a Blue Wall strategy. The three of us together, in all three of our states, turning out the voters, getting people pumped up, educating people.” If they can celebrate victory after that effort, she said, it will mean they can “say ‘Madam President’ for the first time in the history of this country.”