The Blue Wall And Sun Belt Strategies: Harris And Trump’s Pathways To Win

Vice President Kamala Harris is almost certain to be able to win the White House by sweeping the Blue Wall states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, even without taking any states in the Sun Belt where she has also been gaining ground on former President Donald Trump.

Trump very likely needs at least two of the four big battleground states to win, but he could achieve victory with the three biggest prizes on the swing state map — Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Georgia — while losing the rest to Harris.

The Harris and Trump campaign’s different pathways to reaching the 270 Electoral College votes needed for victory in November are beginning to take shape, as the traditional general election season gets underway after Labor Day.

Because Harris starts with slightly more Electoral College votes that are seen as completely secure than Trump, she has a greater variety of pathways to get to a total of 270. But a Newsweek analysis of the Electoral College map and interviews with pollsters and strategists from both parties shows an extremely close race that could easily go either way with just three weeks left before early voting.

“The election is going to come down to three to seven states, and we’re talking about maybe 2 points on the margins across all those states,” said Robert Blizzard, a Republican pollster. “It’s going to be tight.”

The state of the race has shifted dramatically from mid-July, when Trump was pulling ahead of President Joe Biden in polls in all seven battlegrounds after surviving an assassination attempt and rallying supporters at the Republican convention in Milwaukee.

Now Harris enters the fall campaign period leading Trump by an average of 2 percentage points in the seven key battleground states that will determine the winner, according to a Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll released Aug. 29. The margin of error was plus or minus one percentage point across all the states.

“We’ve gone from a situation where Trump had a very clear path to a substantial Electoral College majority, to now one where it truly is a toss-up,” said Charles Franklin, director of the Marquette Law School Poll in Wisconsin.

Electoral College advantage

Harris has risen steadily in the polls since she replaced Biden as the Democratic presidential nominee after he dropped out of the race in late July.

Harris can reasonably rely on winning 226 Electoral College votes, if all the safe and likely blue states — and the congressional districts in Maine and Nebraska that award Electoral College votes to the popular vote winner — remain in the Democratic column. That would leave Harris needing 44 Electoral College votes to capture the presidency.

Trump starts off with 219 reliable Electoral College votes from safe and likely Republican states and congressional districts, meaning he needs 51 Electoral College votes to win a second term in the White House.

Up for grabs are the combined 93 Electoral College votes in the seven battleground contests — the states with the tightest polling margins in the country, and the ones both campaigns view as the most likely to flip one way or the other.

The battlegrounds can be grouped in two categories by their number of Electoral College votes: the larger group consists of Pennsylvania (19), Georgia (16), North Carolina (16), and Michigan (15). The smaller group is made up of Arizona (11), Wisconsin (10), and Nevada (6).

In the 2020 election Biden won six of those seven swing states, reversing Trump’s 2016 pickup of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin and flipping two longtime Republican states blue with surprise wins in Georgia and Arizona. The only battleground state he lost was North Carolina.

A similar showing by Harris would lead to victory. But Harris doesn’t have to do nearly as well as Biden did in 2020 to win thanks to her slight head start over Trump in likely Electoral College votes.

“What Harris has done by replacing Biden is open up at least five or six states,” said Julian Zelizer, a historian at Princeton University. “It’s a much broader Electoral College map.”

In addition to holding the Blue Wall states of the Great Lakes region, Harris has multiple other ways to win by only carrying three of the seven contested swing states. They include winning any three of the big four battlegrounds, or by combining any two of the big four and any two of the smaller battlegrounds.

The flexibility means Harris does not have to win a majority of the battleground states or dominate in any region to secure a victory. It also gives Harris multiple pathways to win without carrying Pennsylvania, the state with the biggest Electoral College vote total among the seven key swing states.

Sun Belt shift

Trump’s options are somewhat more limited. He only has one path to win with just three of the seven battleground states: by carrying Pennsylvania, Georgia and North Carolina, a trifecta that would give him exactly 270 Electoral College votes.

If he fails to do that, all of Trump’s other paths to reaching 270 include winning at least four of the battleground states. And while he can win without Pennsylvania, he has fewer ways to do so than Harris, leaving him with a small margin for error.

Trump’s easiest route to victory may run through the three Sun Belt states of Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina, since all three have consistently backed Republicans for president in the past and have only recently been competitive. Even so, his odds of winning those states has dropped since Harris took over as the Democratic presidential nominee.

“Trump was winning the Sun Belt states” before Biden dropped out of the race, Blizzard said. “Now that the Sun Belt states are back in play, that makes the math a little more complicated.”

Before 2020, Arizona and Georgia had only voted for the Democratic presidential candidate in one of the previous 10 elections going back to 1980.

Biden capitalized on Arizona’s growing Hispanic population and high turnout among Black voters in Georgia to win the states in 2020. But his extremely narrow victories there came by a combined 22,179 votes, a sign the longtime conservative states are still hard for Democrats to win despite demographic shifts that favor their party.

Republicans argued that in 2020 high-profile U.S. Senate races in Georgia helped boost turnout for Biden in the state. Harris will likely energize Black voters, women and other core parts of the Democratic Party base, but she won’t have the down-ballot advantage that Biden did four years ago, Jay Williams, a Georgia-based Republican strategist, said.

“I don’t see how it happens again,” Williams said of a Democrat winning Georgia in consecutive presidential elections.

Still, Trump’s lead in Georgia and Arizona has diminished with Harris in the race. Harris and her running mate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz campaigned in Georgia last week. Harris has also spent significant time there on her own, suggesting the Harris-Walz campaign views Georgia as a key pickup opportunity in November.

Trump has campaigned frequently in Georgia, and his running mate Sen. JD Vance of Ohio has also visited the state.

In North Carolina, Trump has also seen his lead shrink since Harris stepped in to replace Biden on the ticket. Nevertheless Republicans remain bullish about his chances of holding the state in 2024, in large part due to the state’s long history of supporting GOP presidential candidates.

North Carolina has only backed a Democratic presidential nominee once since 1976, when historic Black turnout helped Barack Obama win there in 2008.

Harris campaign aides say the state’s unexpectedly close finish in 2020 is evidence that it’s winnable this election cycle. Trump beat Biden in North Carolina by roughly 74,000 votes or just 1.3 percentage points — the closest margin since Obama’s razor-thin win over John McCain.

Polling is notoriously unreliable in Nevada, the fourth and smallest Sun Belt battleground state.

Democrats have leaned on Nevada’s large Hispanic population and strong union presence to win the state in six of the past 10 presidential elections, including the last four in a row.

The Democrats’ winning streak appeared to be in jeopardy before Biden dropped out, as Trump built a sizable lead in Nevada for most of the year. But much like the other Sun Belt battleground states, available polls show a virtual tie in Nevada between Trump and Harris.

A Trump campaign spokesperson did not respond to a Newsweek request for comment.

A spokesperson for the Harris-Walz campaign pointed to a memo from campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon that outlined the campaign’s efforts to win battleground states in the final two months of the election.

“We maintain multiple pathways to 270 electoral votes, and are growing strength across the types of voters who decide elections in every battleground,” O’Malley Dillon wrote in the Sept. 1 memo.

The Harris campaign has a larger presence in swing states than the Trump campaign, with 312 coordinated field offices and 2,000 coordinated staff across the nation, O’Malley Dillon said. But she said the race would likely be as close as 2020, which came down to roughly 40,000 votes in a handful of states. “This November, we anticipate margins to be similarly razor-thin,” she said.

The fight for the Blue Wall states

With a Republican sweep of the Sun Belt battleground states now looking increasingly unlikely, Trump is under more pressure to carry at least one — and maybe more — of the three Blue Wall states.

Harris has jumped out to an average lead of 2 to 3 points in Michigan and Wisconsin, and has a 1-point average lead in polls in Pennsylvania. Winning all three would put Harris at exactly 270 Electoral College votes.

Republicans chalked up Harris’ lead to a bump in the polls after the Democratic convention. GOP strategists and others in the party predicted it would dwindle after the first Harris-Trump debate on Sept. 10, where Trump is expected to attack Harris on immigration and the economy.

But Republicans conceded that it would be difficult for Trump to sweep the Blue Wall states as he did in his first run for president.

“Trump’s path to victory is going to be winning two of those three states, if not all three,” said Saul Anuzis, a former Michigan Republican Party chairman, but “all three lean Democratic.”

Recent history suggests that winning just one or two of the three Great Lakes states is also unlikely.

Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin have voted the same way in the past five presidential elections. The states went blue in four of them, voting for John Kerry in 2004, Obama in 2008 and 2012, and Biden in 2020.

Trump was the exception in 2016, when he became the first Republican presidential candidate since the 1980s to break through the Democrats’ so-called Blue Wall in the region.

Current polling and past election results indicate the three Blue Wall states will be decided by very small margins again.

Trump won Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin by just 77,000 combined votes in 2016 out of roughly 13.2 million total votes cast. In 2020 Biden more than tripled Trump’s victory margin in the three states, but he still only won them by 256,000 combined votes out of approximately 15.5 million total ballots.

“The conventional wisdom is that whoever has the momentum going into Labor Day has the best shot. I’d probably give the slight edge to Harris” right now, said Williams, the Republican strategist. “But it’s so close,” he added. “We’ll see if the momentum is still there [when early voting starts] in three weeks.”