The Improbable Coalition That Is Harris’s Best Hope
“The battleground state of Michigan reveals the Democrat’s most plausible path to winning the presidency.
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Big margins in the biggest places represent Kamala Harris’s best chance of overcoming Donald Trump’s persistent strength in the decisive swing states. Across those battlegrounds, Harris’s campaign is banking on strong showings both in major urban centers with large minority populations and in the white-collar inner suburbs growing around the cities. Despite widespread dissatisfaction with the economy under President Joe Biden, those are the places where she can find the highest concentrations of voters likely to reject Trump anyway, because they view him as a threat to their rights, their values, and the rule of law.
Posting significant advantages in these large metropolitan areas represents Harris’s best—if not only—opportunity to squeeze past Trump in the most closely contested swing states, particularly the Rust Belt battlegrounds of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin that remain her most likely path to an Electoral College majority.
When Harris visited Michigan last weekend, her itinerary underscored this priority. On Friday night, she appeared before a sizable, enthusiastic audience in Oakland County, a well-educated and prosperous Detroit suburb that has shifted dramatically from red to blue over the past three decades. Then, on Saturday morning, Harris held an event with the singer Lizzo in downtown Detroit on the first day that city residents were eligible to vote early. Yesterday, Harris returned to Oakland County to campaign with former Republican Representative Liz Cheney as part of a day-long sweep by the two women through white-collar suburbs outside Philadelphia and Milwaukee as well.
“That pairing and that geography tells you we think we have a lot of room to run up the score” in those places, Lauren Hitt, a spokesperson for the Harris campaign, told me. Over the weekend, the campaign released strategy memos that cited expanded margins in well-educated suburban communities as the key to Harris’s ability to hold Michigan and Pennsylvania next month. The campaign hasn’t released similar blueprints for the other battleground states, but its formula for victory in all of them looks the same.
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Trump is betting heavily on his ability to combine his historical advantage with working-class white voters with improved performance among working-class Black and Latino voters, especially men—and polls show him making progress toward that goal. Harris’s hopes, particularly in the key Rust Belt battlegrounds, depend on preserving enough of her party’s traditional advantage among striving minority voters clustered in the biggest cities, while expanding the Democrats’ edge among the affluent families who step out of their gleaming SUVs at the Whole Foods and Panera stores a few miles away. If Harris is to prevent Trump’s reelection under a more explicitly authoritarian banner, that incongruous electoral alliance among voters whose lives rarely intersect in other ways may represent the last line of defense for American democracy.
Running up the score in the most populous places has underwritten the Democratic advance in virtually all of the states where the party has prospered since the 1990s. Almost by definition, the few remaining swing states in U.S. politics are those whose populations are closely balanced between the Democratic-leaning big cities and inner suburbs and the Republican-leaning small towns and rural communities.
This year, with college-educated voters, especially women, continuing to recoil from Trump, Harris appears on track for strong performances in the large well-educated suburbs around major cities. That’s particularly true in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, the three states that made Trump president in 2016 when he dislodged them from what I called “the blue wall.” To win those states, much less the Sun Belt battlegrounds where she faces longer odds, Harris will need every vote she can squeeze out of these suburban communities.
Across all the battlegrounds, Trump is pressuring Harris with a powerful pincer movement. From one side, the former president appears poised once again to record towering margins among largely rural, working-class white voters, who are frustrated with higher prices and drawn to his vitriolic attacks on immigrants, elites, and liberals. From the other direction, polls show Trump with an opportunity to make those small but potentially pivotal gains among urban voters of color, particularly men. Harris is unlikely to repel that multifront assault unless she can further improve on Biden’s already significant 2020 margins in the suburbs around major cities from Philadelphia to Phoenix.
These dynamics were at play in Harris’s appearances around the Detroit area last weekend; Trump also appeared in the region last week. When Harris rallied supporters Friday night in Oakland County’s Waterford Township, the fervor of resistance to Trump among the college-educated, professional middle-class voters was fully apparent—even more so than I’d seen in Trump’s earlier campaigns.
The people who were heading into the rally repeatedly reached, unprompted, for the same dire analogy. “Take him at his word,” Powell Miller, an attorney from nearby Rochester, told me. Citing Trump’s recent threat to use the military against “the enemy from within,” he said: “I wish the people of Germany in 1933 took Mr. Hitler at his word.” That sentiment was echoed by June McCallumore, a retired history teacher who wore a T-shirt that read Vote Like Your Granddaughters’ Rights Depend on It. “It’s like ’30s Germany,” she told me. “I know people don’t like you to compare anybody to Nazi Germany, but I’ve studied history.”
Miller and McCallumore were astonished at the backing Trump has sustained after everything that has happened since his defeat in the 2020 election: the January 6 insurrection, the Supreme Court decision overturning the constitutional right to abortion, his manifold legal troubles, and his lurch toward more overtly racist, xenophobic, authoritarian, and plain vulgar language.
“It is shocking to me how many people support him and drank the Kool-Aid,” Miller told me—though he saw one encouraging sign among some lifelong Republican acquaintances who have told him Trump has grown so unstable and vindictive that they’re planning to support Harris.
Inside Harris’s crowded rally in a large exposition hall, the mingled ardor and anxiety was just as intense. “She has to win,” Susan Carey, a retired media director for an ad agency, told me, her voice almost quaking. “My husband and I are doing everything we can to make that happen. I think our democracy depends on it. The other option to me is just unthinkable.” She said that she has recently volunteered to join Democratic voter-mobilization efforts in the county. “Personally, I’m terrified,” she said. “Everyone who is not voting for Trump is incredulous: You can’t understand how this stuff is even happening.”
The next day in Detroit, the picture was more complicated. I spent much of the day at a community event called the Just F**kin Care Fest, sponsored by Detroit Action, a grassroots group that organizes in low-income minority neighborhoods, focusing on the people who are most alienated from the political process. Guiding Detroit Action’s work is a recent study of Black public opinion that calls these disaffected residents the “Rightfully Cynical,” a mostly younger group that it contrasts with the older “Legacy Civil Rights” residents, who retain faith in the political process and more reliably turn out for elections.
As rappers and DJs performed at the festival, I saw plenty of evidence that Harris’s replacement of President Joe Biden as the nominee has rekindled excitement among the legacy generation of Black voters. “A lot of people who are working and middle class can relate to her, that she knows what it is like to struggle,” Panella Page, a retired Air Force veteran, told me. Black women, she said, “are the most disrespected” members of American society, so to see a woman of color “running for commander in chief is substantial.” But Page observed more division among younger generations of Black voters. “What they like about Trump is he’s an entrepreneur,” she said, “he’s a businessman” who, they think, can create more economic opportunity for them.
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A few minutes after I spoke with Page, Piper Carter, a cultural trainer for Detroit Action, took the microphone and, moving through the crowd, issued a passionate warning. “Who is kind of frightened in this moment, politically?” she asked the audience. “Who is very concerned right now that we might lose democracy?” She looked around the crowd, which had offered only a few muted murmurs of assent. “I don’t hear enough concern,” she told them, before adding ominously, “We are the lamb that’s on the altar.”
After Carter returned the mic to the emcee, I caught up with her. The problem was not, she told me, that minority communities did not see Trump as a danger; it was that the failure of any election to improve their neighborhoods had dulled their expectation that voting would produce material change. “Every single time that Detroiters said they wanted something through their vote, it didn’t happen,” she told me. “So it’s difficult to care, because there’s a lot of trauma and pain. It’s not because people don’t care; it’s [that it is] harmful to care.”
Also at the Detroit Action event was Prentiss Haney, a senior adviser for the Democracy Power and Innovation Fund, which works with the organizing group and helped fund the recent study. He told me that focusing solely on Trump is a luxury that most of the people they encounter can’t afford: Economically marginalized Black voters are too consumed by the daily struggle to stay afloat to view Trump as the existential danger that the more financially secure voters I met at Harris’s rally in Oakland County do. “There is a part of the Black electorate that already feels so threatened that the threat [from Trump] is not front and center to them,” Haney told me.
A few blocks away, the city had closed off several streets for a large party sponsored by the Detroit Pistons to promote early voting on its opening day. As local rappers performed, a steady flow of mostly young people filed into the city clerk’s office to cast a ballot. About 800 people ultimately voted at the event, among about 2,000 Detroiters who cast a ballot at similar centers that day.
Because the city’s population has declined so much over the years, Detroit is not the electoral powerhouse it once was: In 2020, Biden won about 240,000 votes from the city, way down from the roughly 325,000 it generated for Barack Obama in 2008. But Daniel Baxter, the longtime COO for the Detroit Department of Elections, told me at the Pistons block party that the stream of early voters on Saturday reinforced the signal from the large number of absentee ballots already returned: He expects turnout among eligible Detroit voters to rise slightly from the 51 percent who showed up in 2020—and significantly from its level in 2016, which was the only recent presidential election when turnout in the city fell below half of eligible voters. That year, Hillary Clinton lost Michigan by 10,700 votes.
In the Rust Belt battlegrounds, the electoral math for Democrats includes holding their own in the region’s unusually large number of midsize, mainly blue-collar cities such as Erie and Scranton in Pennsylvania, Saginaw and Flint in Michigan, and Eau Claire and Green Bay in Wisconsin. Both campaigns have devoted significant time and advertising spending to these places. But history suggests that Harris’s fate will turn on whether she can maximize the party’s advantage in the largest communities that drive these states’ growth of both population and economic activity.
Biden improved over Clinton’s 2016 margins in the counties centered on Detroit, Philadelphia, and Milwaukee—but only by relatively modest amounts, as Trump’s improvement among nonwhite voters that he already demonstrated in 2020 could be more pronounced this year. The bigger shift toward the Democrats in 2020 came in the inner suburbs around those cities. Biden won Michigan’s Oakland County by roughly twice as large a margin (108,000 votes) as Clinton did in 2016, or as Obama did in 2012; Biden also made significant gains in well-educated Kent County, around Grand Rapids, and Washtenaw County, which encompasses the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.
Similarly, Biden won the big four suburban counties outside Philadelphia by a breathtaking combined margin of about 293,000 votes, roughly 115,000 more than Clinton’s four years earlier. In Wisconsin, Biden won booming Dane County, centered on Madison, by about 35,000 more votes than Clinton got in 2016, and he cut her deficit in Waukesha, a historically Republican-leaning suburb outside Milwaukee, by about 10,000 votes. (Harris appeared with Cheney in Waukesha yesterday.)
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In all of these suburban counties, the share of college graduates exceeds the national average. Although they remain predominantly white, they have added more middle-class Black, Asian, and Latino families in recent years. In most of these places, the Democratic share of the vote improved in the 2022 governors’ elections even over Biden’s 2020 performance. These were the first statewide votes after the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion: The abortion issue, Democratic pollsters uniformly believe, remains very salient not only among college-educated suburban women, but also among men in that demographic. On Friday night in Oakland County, the loudest applause for Harris’s speech came when she pledged to sign legislation restoring a nationwide right to abortion.
Given the discontent over the economy, and the ferocity of Trump’s advertising campaign that portrays Harris as an extreme cultural liberal (particularly on crime, immigration, and transgender rights), she will find it difficult to avoid even deeper voter deficits than Biden saw among the smaller, outlying communities of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. At the Harris rally in Oakland County, Paul Witulski, a union shop steward who lives in Macomb County—a heavily blue-collar area fabled as the birthplace of the white, working-class “Reagan Democrats” in the 1980s—told me that pro-Trump fervor is so unconditional in his neighborhood that he fears his house would be vandalized if he planted a Harris sign in his yard.
Given, also, the indications of incremental Trump gains among voters of color, particularly men, Harris’s campaign would consider it a win just to preserve Biden’s margins in the urban cores of Detroit, Philadelphia, and Milwaukee (not to mention in the Sun Belt cities of Atlanta, Phoenix, and Las Vegas). In any scenario, Harris won’t win as large a share of the vote in the white-collar suburbs as she does among the more diverse voters in the central cities. But the potential for the vice president to improve on Biden’s vote share among college-educated women of all races, and possibly among the men in their lives, makes these affluent suburbs the one type of community where she might consistently accumulate a larger advantage than Democrats did in 2020. That represents her best chance to hold back the tide of support that has carried Trump closer to the presidency than seemed possible when he left Washington in disgrace nearly four years ago.“
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