The Democrats’ “Blue Wall” Matters for More than Just Its Electoral Votes

Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin are some of the party’s last lifelines to Middle America.

(Photo by Lynn Grieveson - Newsroom/Newsroom via Getty Images)

As the Democrats gather this week to formally nominate Kamala Harris as their 2024 presidential nominee, pundits, analysts, and operatives are debating what the party’s path to victory might look like this November. Before he dropped out, virtually every metric showed that President Biden was a heavy underdog going into re-election against Donald Trump. Biden’s weak polling left the Democrats’ “Blue Wall” in the Rust Belt as his only real path to 270 electoral votes, as states like Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada, which backed him in 2020, were beginning to look out of reach.

However, Harris’s standing against Trump is remarkably stronger. Since formally entering the race, her favorability numbers have dramatically improved, and in the last couple of weeks, she has overtaken him in the national head-to-head poll averages. Some observers are now positing that Harris’s surge has opened up multiple possible avenues for getting to 270 and winning the Electoral College, including going through the Rust Belt or the Sun Belt.

Others have gone even further. Early in her campaign, advisers close to Harris reportedly debated moving beyond older, whiter, and slightly more rural states like Michigan and Wisconsin altogether and alternatively focus on younger, less white, and more urban states further south. According to Politico, “Harris’s emerging brain trust…[believes her] relative strength with young, Black and Brown voters will put more states in play than a weakened Biden could credibly contest. The Midwest is not where the opportunity is for her. The opportunity…is going to be Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania.” One ally told The Atlantic she hoped to see Harris challenge the idea “that politicians have to appease older white voters in order to be successful.”

So far, Harris doesn’t appear to be taking the bait. Her campaign has already allocated substantial resources in both regions and plans to invest even more in them this fall. Still, the idea that Democrats may eventually try to look beyond the Rust Belt states, whose demographics are increasingly less likely to reflect the party’s, and instead try to build a map that revolves more around states home to the “rising electorate” carries immense risks.

Let’s start with the electoral implications of making such a move. The Blue Wall, comprising Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, contains 44 electoral votes. While these states have been relatively competitive at the presidential level since the turn of the century, they backed the Democratic nominee in five of those six elections, including voting for Obama twice by decent-to-dominant margins.

---

---

In the 2010 midterms, the Republicans made sweeping gains in all three states and maintained them throughout most of the following decade. But Democrats have rebounded since then and shown they can still win in this region. They have reclaimed the governorships in all three states; gained a state-government trifecta and captured all statewide offices in Michigan; flipped Pennsylvania’s Republican-controlled U.S. Senate seat and state House; and won a majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, which later tossed gerrymandered Republican legislative maps, giving Democrats a chance to make big gains in the state government this fall for the first time in over a decade.

So, while these three states may not be demographically appealing to some in the party—their shares of non-college white voters and rural voters are higher than the national average—Democrats are still very much competitive here, especially with the right candidates. And, in fact, these are the three swing states in which Harris currently leads Trump in the polling averages.

Now, let’s move south. There are four presidential battlegrounds in the Sun Belt this cycle: Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and North Carolina. Collectively, they possess 49 electoral votes, five more than the Blue Wall. Many Democrats see the demographics of this region as friendlier to them: relative to the national average, all four states either have higher shares of non-white voters (Nevada), college-educated voters (North Carolina), or both (Arizona and Georgia).

However, with the exception of Nevada, there is no recent history of sustained Democratic support in this region. Rather, most of these states have been GOP-leaning over the past two decades. Obama captured North Carolina in 2008, but it has gone to Republicans by slim margins since then. Meanwhile, Arizona and Georgia were both reliably red for much of that time, though they trended steadily leftward during the Trump era and finally broke for Democrats in 2020 for the first time since the 1990s, no doubt adding to the appeal of this region.

---

---

Certainly, Democrats are showing signs of life in all four states. In Nevada, they have won every presidential election since 2008 and controlled both chambers of the legislature almost without interruption over the past couple of decades. In Arizona, they flipped the governor, secretary of state, and attorney general offices in the 2022 midterm election, and they’re just two seats shy of a majority in each state-legislative chamber. In North Carolina, they have won the last two races for governor and have controlled the secretary of state and attorney general offices for over a century. In Georgia, they now control both U.S. Senate seats.

Still, the party continues to face significant hurdles in them too. In Nevada, Republicans ousted the incumbent Democratic governor and lieutenant governor in 2022 and won the open race for state controller (also previously in Democratic hands). Additionally, since 2008, they’ve cut into the Democrats’ presidential margins here. In North Carolina, Republicans have supermajorities in both state-legislative chambers. In Georgia, they control all non-U.S. Senate statewide offices and have large majorities in both legislative chambers. Only Arizona seems to be without obvious major obstacles for Democrats at the moment.

The point here isn’t that Democrats have to decide between one region or the other; it’s that the data show there’s no reason for them to give up on the Blue Wall anytime soon, even if its demographics may seem less “friendly.” They have a longer track record of success there, including recently, and Harris is leading Trump in the region’s three states (while slightly trailing him in most of the Sun Belt states).

But there’s another, more understated reason why the Blue Wall is important to the Democrats, one that has less to do with strategy and more with image: it basically remains the party’s last connection to Middle America. Let’s say Harris loses Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin but wins anyway by sweeping the Sun Belt toss-up states. Here’s what that map would look like:

---

---

Outside of Illinois and Minnesota, whose Democratic leans are driven almost entirely by Chicago and the Twin Cities, respectively, the rest of the middle of the country is basically Republican territory. Democrats would be building a map that is concentrated on the coasts and in highly educated states like Minnesota and Colorado, devoid of support in most of the middle.¹

Moreover, maps like this would also underscore the Democrats’ shift away from the working class—long the backbone of the party—and its increasing reliance on more affluent and college-educated voters. In 2020, Biden won 25 states and DC, and in just eight of them, including in all three Blue Wall states, was the share of non-college voters higher than the national average. Meanwhile, the electorates in all but two states (Kansas and Utah) that backed Trump were disproportionately non-college-educated.

All this risks reinforcing a growing image of the Democrats as the party of the elites while allowing Republicans to claim the mantle as the party of the working class and Middle America.

---

In a two-party system, coalitions should try to appeal to as many types of voters as possible, and college-educated voters living in coastal states (like myself!) of course deserve representation too. But there are far more non-college voters in the country and electorate. Non-college whites, specifically, continue to make up a large plurality of the voting public and are overrepresented in the Midwest—and the Blue Wall. Democrats can’t build a winning coalition without a significant share of them, a lesson that should have been learned in each of the last two presidential elections. But just as important: they also can’t claim to represent all of America if their electoral map has a glaring hole in the middle of it.²

1. Not to mention that if the Democrats can flip back Florida or finally get over the hump in Texas, this will easily get them past the 270 mark and truly allow them to ignore the Blue Wall altogether.

2. The same thing applies to Republicans, though under Trump they don’t seem to have much interest in representing the whole country.