Presidential campaigns have to make choices about where to pour most of their resources in the final stretch up to the election on November 5th. As many people know, the Electoral College system in the US is such that there are just seven states known as ‘swing’ or ‘battleground’ states (Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, and North Carolina) that play an outsize role in that they are seen as the only ones in contention, while the results of the other 43 states and the District of Columbia are seen as foregone conclusions for one party or the other and not worth campaigning in.
Campaigns need to decide whether they want to go on the offense and ‘expand the map’ (as the cool kids say) by making an effort in non-swing states that are leaning towards the opponents but that they think they have a chance of flipping. For the Democrats, these would be states like Indiana, Iowa, and Florida. Florida has been a tease for them for a long time. The demographics of the state with its rising percentage of Hispanic voters has long seemed promising but each election has seen their hopes dashed, with Republicans winning it comfortably. Republicans have fewer options in prying states out of Democratic hands. New Hampshire, Minnesota, and Virginia used to be possibilities but recently they have gone Democratic and there are reports that the GOP has given up on them, although both New Hampshire and Virginia have Republican governors. Alternatively, campaigns can decide they want to play defense, focusing only on the swing states that they think they have a good chance of winning and have sufficient electoral college votes to put them over the top, and largely ignoring the others.
Even some of the swing states may not be that, well, swingy. North Carolina, while being portrayed as a swing state, was last won by Democrats way back in 2008 with Barack Obama and is a stretch for Democrats. However, it has a fairly liberal Democratic governor in Roy Cooper and the GOP is fielding an extremist (Mark Robinson) for governor this time around. Josh Stein, North Carolina’s attorney general and the Democratic nominee to succeed Cooper, has been consistently leading Robinson in the polls. This gives Democrats some hope that they can pull it away from the GOP, though statewide elections for governor and senator do not track perfectly with voters’ presidential preferences.
A re-energized Democratic electorate has been visible in polling data, which now shows the state as tied. Part of that is the roughly 20% of North Carolinians who are Black; increased African American voter turnout helped Obama win the state in 2008.
But the enthusiasm is far more widespread, and was visible this week, when Harris drew 25,000 people to two rallies this week, one in Charlotte and another a few hours later in Greensboro. It was the vice-president’s 17th trip to North Carolina and her ninth just this year.
…Democrats have long expected a brutal fight in North Carolina, and have been investing time, money and personnel into the state for the last year.
…The Democratic party has 26 field offices in North Carolina with 240 paid staff, according to the campaign. The choices of placement for some of the offices, such as rural Wilson county in the state’s “Black belt” and Lenoir in western mountain country, speak to movement away from a focus on high-density urban territory that’s friendly to Democrats.
Ideally one would go both wide and deep, offense and defense, but using resources on one kind of effort necessarily takes away resources from the other. At this stage, the most valuable resources are campaign staff and volunteers to knock on doors and register and get people to vote early and on election day. Decisions on where to invest resources are often based on internal polls done by the parties which are not released to the public. Sometimes they are also feints, part of the psychological battle. A party might announce that they are spending some resources such as making ad buys in a state that they really do not think they can win but just in order to scare the opponents into pouring resources into that state that they had not planned to do before, just in order to defend it.
Similar ‘go wide or go deep’ strategic decisions need to be made within a state as well, because states are not homogeneous. Typically, large urban and suburban areas tend to favor Democrats while rural areas tend to favor Republicans. So Democrats need to decide whether to pour most of their resources into areas where they are already strong in order to run up the score there to overcome the GOP advantage in the other areas, or whether they should try to reach supporters in rural areas (and even win over ambivalent voters there) in order to chip away the winning margin of the GOP there.
Pennsylvania is a particularly interesting case. There are two very big urban centers in Pittsburgh (on the western end of the state) and Philadelphia (on the eastern end) with large swathes of conservative rural areas in between. I have a friend who lives in central Pennsylvania and he says that people describe the state politically as “Philly and Pitt with Alabama in the middle”. Recently, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz have been visiting rural areas in Pennsylvania (and also in Georgia) in what seems like a ‘go wide’ strategy in that state. (Marcus Ranum at stderr is also a resident of rural Pennsylvania and one should look out for any posts by him on the state of play there, since his insights would be very valuable.)
As a rule of thumb, a campaign that is going wide tends to be one that is feeling confident while one that is going deep tends to be the one that is insecure and feels the need to consolidate its base of support.
Alas, mere policy questions -- schools, health programs, internet expansion, agricultural incentives, taxation, etc -- have become invisible to rural voters in particular, and (despite some worthwhile Biden initiatives) play very little role in campaign strategy.
When we’ve lost the whole point of democracy, how long can its structures persist?
It would make sense to target Republican senators like Ted Cruz or Rick Scott. They have both voted against a pro-IVF bill, an issue that is of concern for affluent families who normally vote Republican. And their lead over Democratic challengers are just 4 % or less, within the margin of error. If only one of them fails, the Riot& Corruption party will be unable to block initiatives in the senate.
So in this particular case it makes great sense to go in deep.
I do not have the bacground knowledge to comment on the “battleground” states.
There is also a bit of a motivation to go deep out of concern with what happens after the election. A candidate wants to look like they won by appealing to everybody. So some wide advertising is often done just to have some coverage everyplace. This has not been much of a concern recently because of hyper partisan politics but prior to 2000 this was a real concern. Now it’s mostly candidates throwing some advertising into areas they know they will win because they don’t want to be seen as having ignored those areas.
I meant wide there.
Colorado was also considered a marginally blue-leaning swing state as recently as 2016-2018. Republicans used to seriously campaign there because it was within reach. It was actually shocking to see Colorado turn so solidly blue in such a short time (starting in 2018 after Democrats swept all statewide offices, even defeating popular incumbent Republicans and winning offices they never did before like Secretary of State).
Even as recently as 2020 and 2022, Republicans were still mildly hopeful the state would turn purple again and fielded several decent candidates (along with hoping the GOP incumbent U.S. Senator would win re-election in 2020) only to be proven it’s not longer viable. I’m always surprised that nobody ever talks about Colorado. It was a very stunning political shift that national Dems should analyze. It has become even more blue than Virginia, New Hampshire and Minnesota; and it happened much more suddenly (though the foundations were laid back as far 2004 when Democrats won the state House and Senate despite Bush and the GOP sweeping most state and federal races).
The description of rural Pennsylvania that I remember hearing the most was ‘Pennsyltucky’.
Ideally, candidates should do both. It is good strategy to focus on winning in the so called swing states for the reasons of electoral success.
It would also be a good strategy to campaign in places like Texas and Florida, which both have a lot of voters who are not happy with their current state legislatures.
(And lots of electoral votes).
If 538 is to be believed today, Florida is now in play. They’re giving about 2/3 odds Harris wins the election, and 1/3 she takes the sunshine state.
Yes. Next question…?
@tethys @8 @raging bee @10
Your answers are like every software project I’ve worked for . We start off saying of course the system must be fast and secure and flexible and maintainable and well designed and so on and then given the time and people and resource constraints it morphs into what is the minimum we could do and not get fired . You missed the limited resources portion of the op.
In this election, the scarcest resource for the Harris campaign is time. The public has demonstrated its willingness to support her in record- breaking fundraising, so some campaign rallies in States with many electoral votes is very sound strategy. They certainly have the financial resources. Since time is limited, it doesn’t make sense to go to the Dakotas or Iowa.
On the other hand, visiting some of those midwestern states in support of Democratic candidates for Senate and House is also crucial to fixing the rot in the Judicial Branch. At the moment, the puppet Mike Johnson (current holder of the world record in shooting self in foot) is demonstrating yet again why the Rmaga cult needs to be voted out of office and relegated to the hall of shame. Can you imagine the media uproar if Obama issued legislative orders to the speaker of the House or Senate?
The media likes to divide us up into red and blue states, but the reality is that many so called red states would turn blue and purple if the Democrats and the unaffiliated independents voters both vote for the Democratic candidate. This election will also measure if the Republican voters were permanently reduced by dying of Covid, which could be statistically just enough to turn lots of formerly red states purple and blue.
Ideally the candidates could visit every state and engage with voters, but again, time is the scarcest resource for Kamala Harris.