Pa., Mich., Wis. still hold keys to 2020
Barely a week out from Election Day, the electoral map is a sprawling landscape, larger than predicted as the campaigns took shape a year ago. But if things are close in the end, the election is still likely to be decided by the trio of northern industrial states that broke the back of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2016.
On Friday, President Donald Trump’s team announced a rally schedule for early next week and it was a telling indicator. The president will stop in both central and southwestern Pennsylvania, in western Wisconsin and in Michigan, where he will campaign in Lansing, the state capital.
In these final days, the president and former Vice President Joe Biden will be going to other places in what is likely to be a frenetic close to the 2020 campaign. But these three states will remain the focal point for the candidates. It has been that way from the very beginning of this election cycle.
Biden currently has more potential paths to the necessary 270 electoral votes than does the president, with opportunities to carry any of several states won by the president four years ago: He is competitive in Florida, North Carolina and Arizona. He is challenging Trump in Ohio, Iowa and Georgia. Even Texas has been surprisingly competitive, or at least was before Biden garbled his climate plan at Thursday’s debate by suggesting he was ready to eliminate the oil industry.
So Biden and his advisers can find multiple options to assemble 270 electoral votes. And given the current state of play, a surge of Democratic votes across all those battlegrounds could produce an electoral landslide for the former vice president. But as Biden’s team calculates the odds, the most logical strategy for securing victory still runs through Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. Everything else will be gravy.
Trump has fewer paths to victory — perhaps just one, which is the same one that got him to the White House four years ago. At this point, it’s questionable whether he can pick off a state that Clinton won in 2016. That means going through Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin becomes his only viable route to 270 — and that presumes he holds everything else. His advantage, though, is that if he doesn’t lose any of the other states he won four years ago, he would need only one of the three (and also wins in Maine’s 2nd Congressional District and all three congressional districts in Nebraska). Biden would need all three if the rest of the map stays as it was in 2016.
Neither camp is prepared to concede anything. Trump is still looking to win over New Hampshire and Minnesota and Nevada, states that went to Clinton in 2016, though the odds don’t look good for him. Biden has been holding his own in Florida, but that state slipped away from Clinton at the last minute four years ago.
Averages of public polls nationally give Biden a lead over Trump of about 10 points. But some Democrats are skeptical of those numbers, believing they may overstate college-educated white voters. They believe the national margin is closer to seven or eight points. But that still means Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin currently favor Biden by about that same margins, and that’s what public and private polls are showing.