Of all the lessons Kamala Harris’s campaign will have learned from Hillary Clinton’s botched run for president eight years ago, among the most important is that it’s better to talk about jobs than guns in the three rust belt states that hold the key to the White House.
The peculiarities of the US’s electoral college will almost certainly see November’s presidential election decided by voters in just seven states. Four – Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina and Georgia – lie in the southern sun belt.
But it is the three to the north – the rust belt states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – that Democratic strategists are focused on. They are, in many ways, the real battleground within the battleground.
Shortly before Joe Biden dropped out the presidential race two weeks ago, his campaign team wrote a memo laying out victory in the rust belt swing states as the “clearest pathway” to defeating Donald Trump.
If Harris, the presumed Democratic presidential candidate, can win the “blue wall” alongside the states that can be relied on to support her then that should deliver the 270 electoral college votes required to take the White House whatever the outcome in the sun belt. But while some of the early signs are good for Harris, the rust belt can be tricky electoral ground, as Clinton found.
Dan Kannien, the director of Harris campaign in the battleground states, claimed on Monday that they are not focusing on one region over another.
“We already have 600 staff on the ground in the blue wall and we’re adding another 150 to that region in the first two weeks of August,” he said.
“The vice-president is strong in both the blue wall and in the sun belt and we are running hard in both.”
But it’s clear that both campaigns see the rust belt as decisive.
Trump’s choice of JD Vance, the Ohio senator and author of Hillbilly Elegy, a memoir about the struggles of the white working class, as his running mate was a move to win over a key constituency, although Vance’s failure to connect with audiences at recent rallies may be causing the former president some regret.
Harris is expected to reveal her vice-presidential running mate before a rally in Pennsylvania on Tuesday. The location has fuelled speculation that it will be that state’s governor, Josh Shapiro, although Harris’s aides have cautioned against reading too much into the connection.
Two other state governors, Tim Walz of Minnesota and Andy Beshear of Kentucky, are also reported to be serious contenders for the post. Either would probably play well in key rust belt constituencies. But the appeal of Shapiro lies in his strong approval ratings even among some Republicans and his defeat of a Trumpist rightwinger, Doug Mastriano, by a wide margin in the governor’s race two years ago.
Harris has also made Michigan’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer, a campaign co-chair after she ruled herself out of the vice-presidential contest. Whitmer will be a valuable asset in keeping the campaign focused on the issues that matter to midwestern voters after she defeated a Trump-backed candidate by 11 points in 2022 while Democrats took control of the Michigan state legislature for the first time in 45 years.
All of this is a tacit acknowledgment of how badly wrong Clinton’s campaign got it in 2016. She was the first Democratic presidential candidate since the late 1980s to lose the three blue wall seats. Her defeat can in part be attributed to a mix of hostility to elitism in general and the Clintons in particular, a perception compounded by controversies surrounding her speeches to Wall Street firms and other wealthy groups.
Her campaign focused on urban voters and too often neglected rural and working-class whites who felt left behind by globalisation and free trade policies that saw jobs exported. Union officials complained that Clinton’s team failed to listen to advice to talk more about protecting jobs from unfair competition by China and less about gun control.
Trump, on the other hand, tapped into rust belt grievances by promising to renegotiate trade deals, bring back manufacturing jobs and “drain the swamp” of Washington politics.
On election day, voter turnout among key demographics in the rust belt, including Black voters, was lower than expected for Clinton in contrast to real enthusiasm for Trump.
Four years later, Trump’s vote went up substantially in all three states but he lost them because voters who stayed away when Clinton was on the ticket came out for Biden. But as Biden’s disastrous debate performance in June shifted the focus on to his health and fitness for office, there was a real risk that enough voters would stay away again to deliver Trump back into the White House.
Harris has been the presumptive nominee for less than two weeks but has already gained ground against Trump in all but one of the seven swing states. One poll shows her doing better than Biden in the rust belt and as neck and neck with Trump in the three key states. Another poll puts Harris 11 points ahead in Michigan and two in Wisconsin although she trails Trump by four points in Pennsylvania.
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Harris is also doing as well as Biden, if not better, among older voters and white men without a college degree, two key demographics in the rust belt states who could decide the election.
It remains to be seen how enduring the shift is once the Republicans start blasting out negative advertising accusing Harris of responsibility for the crisis on the Mexican border after Biden appointed her to look into the root causes of the flood of migrants from Central America, a key issue for many voters even in Wisconsin, 1,500 miles from the frontier.
But for now, Harris has injected new life into the campaign where it matters. The shift from a shuffling, hesitant Biden to a vigorous Harris has re-energised Democratic campaign workers who were increasingly demoralised about the prospects of defeating Trump.
The first Black, female vice-president looks more likely than Biden to draw Black voters to the polls, a key to winning Michigan in particular but also of significance in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. She is also expected to prove a more effective advocate for abortion rights than Biden, a major political issue after the supreme court struck down Roe v Wade.
Reproductive rights is the most important political issue for 15% of voters in Wisconsin, where the issue decided an election to the state supreme court last year in favour of a judge committed to upholding abortion rights. Those voters alone could decide who wins a state that Biden took by fewer than 21,000 votes, just 0.6% of the ballot, in 2020.
The Harris campaign is already blitzing the blue wall states with messaging emphasising Trump and Vance’s support for a national abortion ban.
Harris could also prove an additional advantage in Michigan, where Biden’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza did him damage with the state’s significant number of Arab and Muslim voters. More than 100,000 people voted uncommitted in the state’s Democratic primary in February in a protest against the man widely derided as “Genocide Joe”.
Biden won Michigan in 2020 by only 154,000 votes.
Harris’s record on the Gaza war is less contentious. She has spoken in support of Israel but has been more open than Biden in her criticism of its military strategy in Gaza and condemned the deaths of “too many innocent Palestinians”.
Harris also snubbed Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress last month, although she did hold a meeting with him and Biden. Afterwards Harris said she told the Israeli prime minister of her “serious concern about the scale of human suffering in Gaza”.
“What has happened in Gaza over the past nine months is devastating – the images of dead children and desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety, sometimes displaced for the second, third or fourth time. We cannot look away in the face of these tragedies. We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering. And I will not be silent,” she said.
Trump responded by accusing Harris of “running away from Israel”, but her statements will do her no harm among younger voters who have become alienated from the Democratic party over Biden’s position on the war.