Vice President Kamala Harris is facing an increasingly uphill battle in the Midwest as she seeks the 270 electoral votes required to win the 2024 presidential election.
What was once thought to be the easiest path for Harris—winning the “blue wall” battleground states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, along with Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District—has become more challenging, as recent polling shows her slipping behind in Michigan and Wisconsin.
Harris’ campaign has put energy into ensuring the trio of Midwestern battlegrounds, which flipped from Donald Trump in 2016 to Joe Biden in 2020, stay blue in November.
Rebuilding this wall was seen as Harris’ clearest route to the presidency, especially since polling earlier in the race suggested she held narrow but consistent leads in all three. The states have voted the same way as each other in every election since 1988, where Wisconsin fell for Michael Dukakis, while Michigan and Pennsylvania voted for George H.W. Bush.
Kamala Harris’ Easiest Path to 270 Appears to Have Got Harder
Photo Illustration by Newsweek/Getty Images
But new data shows that Trump’s campaign is gaining momentum in these states, turning what was already expected to be a tight race into an even tougher fight.
According to a Quinnipiac University poll released on Wednesday, Trump leads Harris by three points in Michigan (50 percent to 47 percent) and two points in Wisconsin (48 percent to 46 percent). While Harris still maintains a three-point lead in Pennsylvania (49 percent to 46 percent), her campaign’s efforts in the industrial Midwest appear to be slipping.
The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this week that in Wisconsin, recent internal polling from Democrat Tammy Baldwin‘s Senate campaign showed Harris trailing Trump by 3 points, even as Baldwin herself holds a narrow 2-point lead in her own race.
A person familiar with the poll told the WSJ that the Republican Party‘s strength with non-college-educated men is largely responsible for the shift.
Charles Franklin, professor of law and public policy at Marquette University and director of the Marquette Law School Poll, told Newsweek that Wisconsin has a history of razor-thin presidential margins.
“The history of Wisconsin presidential elections since 2000 has been of very close races, four of the six elections decided by less than 1 percentage point,” Franklin said.
Franklin said Harris is leading Trump by a slim margin, but the race could easily swing in either direction.
“The polling averages currently put Harris’ lead in the state at under a point. In our September polls, we had her up by 4 points, but Wisconsin’s rural areas have become increasingly Republican since 2012,” Franklin said. “Much of the outcome rests on GOP success in rural Wisconsin and Democratic dominance in Dane and Milwaukee counties.”
“The other region of interest is the Green Bay and Fox Valley counties (Brown, Outagamie and Winnebago) that lean Republican. A GOP surge there could tilt the race to Trump while a Democratic over-performance would be a big asset to Harris.”
Trump has seized on this opportunity, holding four Wisconsin rallies in nine days in late September and early October.
At a rally in Juneau, a rural town north of Madison, Trump confidently declared: “If we win Wisconsin, we win the presidency.”
Trump won the state by less than 23,000 votes in 2016 and lost it by just under 21,000 votes in 2020. Polling indicates the race is expected to be just as close in 2024.
Harris’ performance in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania has lagged behind that of Biden’s in 2020, especially when it comes to organized labor.
While Harris has secured endorsements from influential unions like the United Auto Workers and the Service Employees International Union, others, such as the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and the International Association of Fire Fighters, have withheld their support.
Trump has consistently targeted blue-collar workers in the Midwest with his rhetoric on high costs, the loss of manufacturing, and the threat of China’s growing influence.
At a recent event in Flint, Michigan, Harris pushed back against Trump’s claims that she intends to “end all gas-powered cars,” reassuring the crowd that “I will never tell you what kind of car you have to drive.”
Polling analyst Nate Silver echoed concerns about Harris’ slipping position in the Midwest but cautioned against overreacting to individual polls, writing in his blog on Wednesday: “The chances of a Trump win in the Electoral College are about even.”
Silver’s analysis points to a longstanding tendency among Democrats to panic as election day nears, a phenomenon amplified by “the scar tissue left over from 2016,” where Trump beat Hillary Clinton in all three.
Newsweek has contacted the campaigns of Trump and Harris for comment via email.
