Whether measured by campaign advertising, candidate visits, organizational effort or nervous obsessing over poll results, Michigan, Wisconsin and above all Pennsylvania have moved to the top of the priority list for both Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump – just as they have in seemingly every recent presidential election.
Trump won the presidency in 2016 by stunning Democrat Hillary Clinton to win all three states by a combined margin of about 80,000 votes. President Joe Biden won back the White House in 2020 by recapturing all three states by a combined margin of around 260,000 votes.
Since Harris took over at the top of Democratic candidate in July, the candidates have spent more money in advertising in Pennsylvania than anywhere else.
Bob Shrum, the long-time Democratic strategist who now serves as the director of the Center for the Political Future at the University of Southern California, said the three Rust Belt battlegrounds have remained pivotal in presidential elections for so long because they encapsulate so many of the entrenched divisions that now define American politics – between, for instance, urban and rural areas and white-collar and blue-collar voters. “They reflect the polarization,” Shrum said.
Other political operatives point out that the historic tendency of these three states to vote the same way in presidential elections functionally makes them the nation’s largest swing state at a time when the other biggest states lean reliably toward one party or the other (California, New York and Illinois toward Democrats; Texas, Florida and Ohio toward Republicans).
