Trump vs. Harris
How these seven states became the battleground of the US election
IAN LIESCH (text) and CLAUDIA BOTHE (graphics)
November 5, 2024 · Only a handful of the fifty states are “too close to call” – in the polls. What makes them so special? And how did they shape the Trump and Harris campaign?
Sometimes campaigning just isn’t worth it. If it is clear from the start that a Donald Trump cannot get a majority in a progressive state like California or a Kamala Harris in a conservative state like Texas, then they do not want to waste time or money there. Even a really good second place doesn’t help at all: the winner gets all the voters – “winner takes all”, say the Americans. People in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin in the northeast as well as Nevada, Arizona, North Carolina and Georgia had it all the more often South of the United States most recently visited by Trump, Harris and the two most prominent advocates. On the Internet, on the radio, on television and even on their own doorsteps, they could hardly escape election advertising. This was especially true for the few who had not long ago decided who they would vote for – or whether at all. Both candidates have tailored their messages to them. So what makes the voters of these “swing states” that half the world is staring at on this election night?
Pennsylvania
Electors 2024:
19 of 538
Resident:
13 million
Winner 2020:
Biden with a lead of 81,660 votes
Pennsylvania, which is “Philadelphia to the east and Pittsburgh to the west with Alabama in between,” is how Bill Clinton’s campaign strategist James Carville once characterized the state. The state in the northeast of the USA provides the most electoral votes among the swing states and is correspondingly competitive. Kamala Harris primarily wants to mobilize voters in the two metropolises. Philadelphia is one of the prosperous megacities in the “Acela Corridor” from Washington to Boston, named after an express train, a kind of mini-New York with a financial industry and large biotechnology companies; four out of ten residents are African American. Pittsburgh’s population is significantly whiter. But the former steel capital in the west of the state has also mastered the transition to a knowledge and service society and attracted many well-educated Americans who are harder to win over for Trump.
In between, however, there are a lot of Trump strongholds: the state’s many smaller industrial and mining centers have been in decline since the 1970s – including Scranton, where Joe Biden was born in 1942. Production has been outsourced abroad, and fewer and fewer workers are producing anything. This was a breeding ground for Trump, who rocked the state with commitments to coal mining and fracking as well as tirades against free trade and won in 2016. The Democrats apparently overlooked the fact that even union members were deserting them in droves.
Pollsters view the diverse Pennsylvania as a microcosm of the USA. What happens here may say a lot about the mood elsewhere. However, because of the counting rules, it will probably take a particularly long time until a result is available in the “Keystone State”.
Electors 2024:
15 of 538
Resident:
10 million
Winner 2020:
Biden with a lead of 154,188 votes
The “Great Lakes State” in the north of the USA is not only proud of its large lakes, but also of the “Big Three”: The three major car manufacturers General Motors, Ford and Chrysler have their headquarters in Michigan’s largest city, Detroit. Historic skyscrapers testify to its importance for the region – and at the same time, the many brownfield sites in the city, which has shrunk for decades, reveal that it is not an unbroken success story. It is not without reason that Michigan is considered part of the “Rust Belt”. In any case, Donald Trump is getting a lot of attention for his tirades against electric cars. The Democrats can no longer blindly rely on the union members, even though the leadership of the United Auto Workers officially called for the election of Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris. Many white workers have sympathy for Trump. Hillary Clinton didn’t see this coming in 2016.
Another group of voters is causing headaches for the Democrats today. There are 200,000 Arab registered voters in Michigan. Actually inclined towards the Democrats, many are likely to boycott the election in protest against the White House’s Gaza policy that is perceived as too Israel-friendly. In the view of many spokesmen, Harris did not distance himself enough from Biden’s course and took too half-hearted attention to the dissidents.
Immediately after the 2020 election, Trump supporters orchestrated what initially appeared to be a spontaneous protest in front of a counting center in Detroit. They threatened poll workers, almost all of whom were black – in Detroit, African Americans make up four out of five residents. The demonstrators who made far-fetched allegations of manipulation by the aid workers came from the vast, fairly white rest of the state.
Electors 2024:
10 out of 538
Resident:
5.9 million
Winner 2020:
Biden with a lead of 20,682 votes
You’d think that in Wisconsin, Democrats and Republicans would still have a common sense of what’s important. After all, the delegations from both parties once again wore huge yellow Styrofoam cheese on their heads at the respective nomination party conferences – a homage to the around 5,500 dairy farms with their 1.3 million cows in the state on the border with Canada. Twelve percent of Wisconsin’s workforce is in agriculture. In reality, Wisconsin has been seen as a particularly polarized state for some time, with political politics being quite unforgiving – and without any extraordinary external shocks. Most statistics point towards stability. Of course, the decline of industry affected the large city of Milwaukee – but the state as a whole was not as bad as Michigan or Pennsylvania.
Demographic changes are limited; No other state with more than five million residents is “whiter” than Wisconsin. The flat land is in Republican hands. In addition to Milwaukee, which is less than two hours’ drive from Chicago, Madison, with its progressive university, is a safe bet for the Democrats.
The Republicans wisely held their nomination convention in Milwaukee in July. They want to repeat the miracle of 2016: Trump was the first Republican since Ronald Reagan in 1984 to win the state – without any warning from the polls and with a lead of less than 23,000 votes. Biden won it back in 2020 – by less than 21,000 votes.
Electors 2024:
6 of 538
Resident:
3.2 million
Winner 2020:
Biden with a lead of 33,596 votes
The “Silver State” in the “Wild West” is also an example of how demographic developments can change election outcomes. Around 20 percent of those eligible to vote there are now Latinos – a group of voters who are traditionally predominantly Democratic. However, party loyalties are not very strong in Nevada: In Nevada, more citizens registered to vote as independents than as supporters of either party. These potential swing voters are being heavily courted by both sides.
More than two-thirds of the approximately three million residents in the sprawling ranching state live in Clark County, where Las Vegas’ casinos and hotels are the main employers – including the Trump International Hotel. Trump had hospitality workers in mind when he promised something in Nevada that would also make him attractive to immigrant waiters and bartenders: “No tax on tips.”
Democrats were initially outraged by what they saw as an election gift that had not been taken into account. Then Kamala Harris followed suit and promised the same. Because she too cannot afford to forego the six electors in a state in which Barack Obama won twice by a clear margin, but the Republicans have made up a lot of ground since then.
Electors 2024:
11 of 538
Resident:
7.4 million
Winner 2020:
Biden with a lead of 10,457 votes
The desert state of Arizona shares almost 600 kilometers of border with neighboring Mexico. The election campaign here revolved largely around the issue of migration, on which Trump knows how to drive the Democrats ahead of him. Nevertheless, Joe Biden was able to win in the state in 2020 as the first Democrat since 1996. How did the Grand Canyon State turn, if not blue, then at least purple? The first answer is: immigration. 25 percent of eligible voters identify as Latino. However, in Arizona that doesn’t mean that they will necessarily vote for the Democrats. In fact, there are increasingly loud voices in this community calling for tough action at the border. However, Arizona is also growing due to immigration from other US states: the weather is warm even in winter and the cost of living is lower than in California.
Therefore, the second answer is: urbanization. More than 60 percent of Arizona residents live in Maricopa County, the county in which the capital Phoenix is located. This sprawling metropolis is now the fifth largest in the United States. It’s not a traditional Democratic stronghold like New York, Chicago or Los Angeles – but the trend is heading in that direction.
In addition, the Democratic strategists kept an eye on the indigenous population. The Navajo reservation is largely located in Arizona. In a state where Biden won by just 11,000 votes, they cannot be ignored either. But the Harris campaign is also having a hard time getting them to the ballot box.
North Carolina
Electors 2024:
16 of 538
Resident:
10.8 million
Winner 2020:
Trump with a lead of 74,483 votes
It is only in the last few weeks that another state from the “Old South” has been appearing regularly on the swing state lists again: North Carolina on the Atlantic, where Trump has already won twice, but by a narrow margin. The last Democrat to win in the state was Barack Obama in 2008 – but four years later he was unable to assert himself there. The strange thing is: Just as the state’s citizens have voted Republican in presidential elections in recent decades, they have also often voted for Democrats as governor. For Harris, it’s all about mobilizing the black population: 22 percent of the electorate, almost nine percentage points more than the national average. The fact that they can have any hope at all is also due to the unequal population growth in North Carolina – it is the more left-liberal (university) cities that are attractive to Americans from other states.
Hurricane Helene also caused extensive damage in North Carolina. This became a major election issue, partly because Trump made strong accusations against the disaster management agency FEMA. The vote could therefore also be a vote on emergency aid from the federal government under Biden and Harris.
Electors 2024:
16 of 538
Resident:
11 million
Winner 2020:
Biden with a lead of 11,779 votes
Georgia on the Atlantic is part of the “Deep South” of the United States – the Deep South, whose economy depended particularly on slavery before the Civil War. This meant that it was firmly in the hands of Democrats until, in a 180-degree turnaround, they declared themselves the spearhead of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. After 1960, only two Democratic presidential candidates were able to win in Georgia: the state’s peanut farmer Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton (because two conservatives stole votes from each other in 1992) – and Joe Biden four years ago. His victory was largely due to the systematic registration and mobilization of black voters, who make up a third of the population. The development of deep red Georgia into a swing state cannot be explained without the long-standing boom of Atlanta.
More than half of Georgia’s population lives in the metropolitan area of the state’s capital. As an international hub, their airport is one of the largest in the world. Atlanta also became a hub of America’s entertainment industry, thanks to targeted tax breaks in the early 2000s. Numerous Marvel Studios films were filmed here. In this way, a bit of Hollywood came politically to the Old South.
The Republicans are trying to counter this by raising doubts about the vote count. Trump’s call to the Republican “Secretary of State” after the extremely narrow defeat in 2020 to “find” him the missing 11,800 votes is legendary. Until shortly before the election this year, Republicans tried to change the voting law in their favor. The fact that this failed in court now serves as proof that the election was unfair.