Joe Biden’s best path might not be Harris’s best path.
Vice President Kamala Harris is the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. But can she win the presidency?
Due to the wonders of the Electoral College system, the answer depends on how she will do in a limited number of swing states.
In 2020, seven states had their presidential winner determined by less than 3 percentage points: Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina. Joe Biden won the first six out of those seven, so he won the White House.
When President Biden was still in the race, polling was looking grim for him in all these states. Commentators speculated that North Carolina, Arizona, Georgia, and perhaps even Nevada were out of reach for him.
Biden’s best path to victory, it was believed, was to hold strong in the Rust Belt trio of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Those three swing states, plus the traditionally Democratic states and a single electoral vote from Nebraska’s Second Congressional District, would have given Biden 270 electoral votes — the bare minimum he needed to win.
But Biden’s best path may not be Harris’s. There’s an optimist’s case that that’s good news for her — and a pessimist’s possibility that it’s a real problem.
The pessimistic case is that some suspect Harris may do worse among Rust Belt working-class whites than “Joe from Scranton” did — making states like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania a tougher reach for her.
The optimistic case is that perhaps Harris will do better than Biden among nonwhite voters — putting states with particularly large Black populations (Georgia and North Carolina) or Hispanic populations (Arizona and Nevada) back into contention.
Some initial poll results on how Harris does in swing states have trickled in since Biden dropped out, though given the recent upheaval in the contest, it’s not clear how much to make of them. But here’s how the swing state math stacks up.
In 2020, Biden won the national popular vote by 4.5 percentage points, but the contest for an Electoral College majority was much closer. Biden stacked up 19 safe Democratic states, the District of Columbia, and Nebraska’s Second District.
But he got over the top by triumphing narrowly in six of the seven swing states listed above.
