The “blue wall” of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, which has paved the way for Democratic presidents for the past two decades, is showing signs of erosion, according to insiders close to the Harris campaign.
NBC News reported that senior campaign staffers are sounding the alarm about flagging results in Michigan, a critical battleground which narrowly went for former President Donald Trump in 2016 and President Joe Biden in 2020. However, the state’s vibrant Arab-American population has largely sat on the sidelines, disaffected with Harris’s increasingly vocal support for Israel and willingness to denounce public disruptions by pro-Palestinian activists. That development, as well as skepticism of the Democrat among younger voters key to strong turnout in places like Ann Arbor, are putting the state in play for Trump, insiders say.
Recent discussions within the Harris campaign involve gaming out a scenario where Wisconsin and Michigan “fall” to Trump while Pennsylvania goes blue; even with the latter representing a critical win for Harris, she would still fall short of the necessary 270 Electoral College votes to win the election, aides believe. “There has been a thought that maybe Michigan or Wisconsin will fall off,” a senior Harris official told the outlet. They and two other sources all underscored their deepest concern is Michigan, a state that shouldn’t typically be such a tough hill for Democrats to climb in a presidential year.
A spokesperson for the Harris campaign was quick to brush off anonymous concerns about their Michigan numbers and pointed to recent polls giving the vice president a narrow lead in the state. “We absolutely are competing to win Michigan,” Harris spokesperson Lauren Hitt said, pointing to Harris’s Monday night town hall with Liz Cheney. “We think we will win Michigan.” Hitt said the same about Wisconsin and that she sees no signs of slippage in the polls there.
The pervasive fear of losing steam in swing states has Harris insiders also bringing up results in North Carolina. “Of all of the seven [states], that one seems to be a little bit slipping away,” one anonymous campaign source told NBC News. North Carolina has seen the most tumult in the past month: destabilization by Hurricane Helene and the collapse of Republican gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson’s campaign have both complicated turnout efforts for both presidential campaigns, but it is Trump who appears to be coming out on top; he leads by 0.9%, according to FiveThirtyEight. In September, the North Carolina Supreme Court ruled that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. could have his name removed from the ballot, another win for Trump.
The Harris campaign has insisted it continues to run a seven-state strategy that encompasses all four states as well as Arizona, Nevada, and Georgia. “I don’t see a blue wall path or a Sun Belt path or a Southern path. I see seven states that are as close as it gets that will all be decided by margins on the ground,” Harris battleground state director Dan Kanninen told NBC News. “And so we built an operation that can win close races on the ground, expecting that. And truthfully, one of the seven has as good a chance as any other to be the tipping-point state.
