As Election Day Nears, Trump and Biden Strive to Flip Key States

As the U.S. election reaches its home stretch, President Trump and former Vice President Biden haveCadopteddivergent campaign strategies which reflect deeper, structural changes in the geography of American politics. Several Southern states, long a bastion of the GOP, have shown a rising tide of Democratic support, leading Bidento campaign in Georgia and Texas. President Trump, by contrast, is pinning his hopes on reprising his 2016 victoryby flipping several traditionally Democratic states in the Upper Midwest.
 
BIDEN SEEKS INROADS IN THE SOUTH
 
Vice President Joe Biden’s presidential campaign has adopted a unique strategy of reducing in-person campaign appearances, ostensibly to minimize the risk of coronavirus infections. As Mr. Biden himself recently commented, “We’re not putting on super-spreaders. We are doing what we’re doing here—everyone is wearing a mask,” adding that “it's important to be responsible.”
 
Beyond coronavirus concerns, Biden’s campaign has gambled that reducing the candidate’s visibility will, paradoxically, boost his chances with voters. “He’s running a disciplined campaign. He’s doing more than a lot of people give him credit for,” according to GOP strategist Alex Conant. “He’s speaking, really, as little as possible, and rolling out a very strategic and very in-depth series of policy proposals that check a lot of boxes with constituents he needs to win, like the progressive wing of the party, while at the same time, not saying anything that’s going to strongly turn off swing voters.” According to Democratic strategist Joel Payne, “It's a classic do no harm strategy ... He hasn’t given Trump anything to hit at.”
 
For all that, Biden has launched a last-minute push to campaign in Southern states that have not voted for a Democratic presidential candidate in decades. This week he campaigned in Georgia, a state that hasn’t voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since 1992. He has also deputized his running mate, Senator Kamala Harris of California, to campaign extensively in Texas, which has served as the backbone of the Republican electoral coalition for two generations and last voted for a Democrat in 1976.
 
TRUMP MOVES TO FLIP THE NORTH 
 
In parallel to Biden’s closing appeal to the traditionally conservative Southern states, President Trump is campaigning aggressively in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. All have traditionally voted Democratic in recent decades, typically by wide margins. After all, it was Trump’s surprise victory in all three — by a collective margin of under 100,000 votes — that handed him the White House over Hillary Clinton in 2016.
 
Today, President Trump and his campaign advisers hope to repeat that performance by consolidating new Republican inroads in the Upper Midwest. Trump himself has told the press that he plans to do up to five rallies a day in the final week before the election. In this he has been aided by the Democratic party’s embrace of a number of socially progressive causes foreign to the predominantly white and non-urban population of those states. “The Midwest is ground zero here,” said Matt Canter, a Democratic pollster originally from Wisconsin. After years of taking victory in those states for granted, “the math doesn’t work in these states without winning large swaths of white voters.”
 
As election analyst Sean Trende has noted, “Over the years, Democratic strength in Midwestern rural areas has been on the decline, just as in the South.” In Trende’s view, “this tendency became particularly acute during the Obama years.  We just didn’t really notice, because the rural areas don’t outvote the cities, as they do in the South.  But the polarization reached a point in 2016 where it mattered.” And, in a few short days, it could well matter again.