American Horror Story: Without VP Harris on the ticket, what parts of the country are flippable?
The second and final installment of the nightmare "What If" scenario
Sometimes the best editor is l'esprit d'escalier, the spirit at the bottom of the staircase. Or, the afterthought.
Wednesday, I felt I made a strong case for how the Asian-American community, which had strong ties to Vice President Harris in 2020, was an important (and underreported) part of the ticket’s victory in Georgia. But around midnight that night it occurred to me that I never got around to the core of my argument — giving actual concrete examples of swingy parts of the country that Biden might lose if Harris is taken off the ticket. Though the polls are not good for Biden right now, no one has actually voted yet in the 2024 election. Further, Biden in 2020 was known as a strong and loyal lieutenant to Barack Obama, and had strong African-American support. President Biden’s bona fides in the African-American community were secure then, his landslide victory in the South Carolina primary was an example of that strength.
That was then; this is now. By the midterms in 2022, Biden’s African-American support had significantly softened. This is part due to performance and in part because of the economy. In June 2022, the Washington Post interviewed Stacy Mumford, a school nutritionist, who felt that President Biden had not lived up to his end of the bargain with African-American voters. “Like Mumford, roughly 9 in 10 Black voters supported Biden in the 2020 election, but a Washington Post-Ipsos poll of more than 1,200 Black Americans this spring finds what appears to be diminishing support: 7 in 10 approve of President Biden’s job performance, and fewer than one quarter ‘strongly approve,’” the article said at the time. “A 60 percent majority of Black Americans say Biden is keeping most of his major campaign promises, but 37 percent say he is not.” Now — imagine if Kamala Harris were replaced on the ticket.
Biden beat Trump in 2020 by almost seven million votes and 74 votes in the electoral college, which sounds like much, but it really is not. “Biden's national popular vote margin, that 7 million-vote edge, comes from just two states: California and New York,” Dante Chini of NBCNews reminds us. And we must remember that two years later — 2022 — in the midterms, New York gave the GOP a third of their national gains. While the so-called “red wave” never happened, but the New York red wave in House elections did. A large part of Biden’s electoral strength is with the African-American community. That support is visibly and demonstrably softening. How much further does that support erode if the President replaces the first African-American woman on the ticket? How many African-Americans would regard such a snub as a permission structure to vote for third party candidate, Cornel West?
The popular vote doesn’t matter in electing a President, except to historians and perhaps statisticians. As NPR's Domenico Montanaro famously put it, "just 44,000 votes in Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin separated Biden and Trump from a tie in the Electoral College." So here are five parts of the country where Biden beat Trump in 2020, but might, without Vice President Harris’s placement on the ticket, revert to Trump, possibly giving him the Presidency in 2024 in a nightmare apocalyptic scenario. The five:
Wisconsin. Wisconsin is now a legitimate swing state, with ten electoral college votes. But it was not always so. According to 270towin.com:
Democrats won the seven elections from 1988 through 2012, although the 2000 and 2004 races were extremely close. This streak was broken in 2016 when Donald Trump won the state by 0.7% over Hillary Clinton. The victory came despite the fact that of the dozens of polls tracked in the months leading up to the election, not a single one had him winning here. The state returned to the Democratic fold in 2020, as Joe Biden won narrowly over Trump.
Biden won over Trump by less than a single percentage point. Further, keep in mind that though Wisconsin was one of the three swing states that gave Biden the Presidency in 2020 and got redder during the 2022 midterms. There have been many swing counties in the state ever since Trump entered the electoral fray in 2016. That was the year that Bernie Sanders won the primary.
Fast forward to the midterms. Voter turnout in largely African-American Milwaukee City and County dropped in the Johnson-Barnes Senate race in 2022, which led the the re-election of Ron Johnson. "That has to be concerning to Democrats and the Barnes campaign, in particular; what is one of the great bastion of Democratic votes in the state didn't turn out as much as you would have expected," Charles Franklin, Director of the Marquette Law School Poll, told Spectrum News. How would this county vote in the event that Kamala Harris was no longer on the ticket? And if the African-American support softened without Harris on the ticket, how would that affect his vote totals in the state, which he won by under 1% over Trump.
Pennsylvania. Trump beat Hillary in this state by under 50,000 votes, to give you a sense of how close a swing state this is. Four years later, in 2020, Biden beat Trump by about 80,000 votes. Biden got 92% of the African-American vote and, amazingly, Trump got 7% in the state. The majority of Biden’s 3.45 million votes in the state — 603,790 votes — came from Philadelphia, which is 43 percent African-American (and, significantly, 8.2% Asian-American). And while the state went bluer in the midterms, the question remains: Can Biden keep his 2020 margins among African-Americans — necessary margins to hold the state — without the Vice President?
Georgia. As I mentioned on Wednesday, the importance of the surge in Asian-American votes in Georgia is widely underreported. And, clearly, their vote was as pro-Harris/Biden as it was anti-Trump, who was, to put it lightly, not an ally of Asian-American voters during the COVID lockdowns.
But what I didn’t get to and wished I had is how much an upsurge in the African-American vote helped Biden win the Peach State. No examination of the shifting demographics of the Georgia electorate can be made without mentioning the importance of Stacy Abrams and her passionate ambition to expand the electorate. From Elena Mejia and Alex Samuels of Fivethirtyeight:
In 2020, the counties in Atlanta’s metro areas3 that saw the biggest increases in the number of Black Americans casting their ballots also saw some of the strongest shifts toward Biden and were key to helping him win. About 32 percent — or over 136,000 — more Black voters showed up in 2020 than in 2016, when Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton was on the ballot.
Indeed. Black voters were instrumental to Biden’s win, which begs the question: would the black vote be as robust if Vice President Harris were removed from the ticket? In 2022, there were already signs of the black vote in the Peach state softening.
Finally:
NY3. I am intimately familiar with this district, having lived there for many years as a teenager. But the districts has changed. A large chunk of Nassau County has been added, turning NY3 very competitive. George Santos — the most reviled Congressman — is running for re-election, but he is also being challenged in the primary. It is hard to imagine a scenario in which Santos wins even the primary, which is not good news for Democrats. Santos is easily defeatable, with his massives negatives in the district. “Despite the calls for his resignation, Santos in April announced he would still seek reelection,” writes Rebecca E Lewis of CityandStateNY. “But his support, even among those who have stood by him like Rep. Elise Stefanik, is almost nonexistent as Republicans continue to attempt to distance themselves from Santos.”
A Republican primary challenger that unifies the district could present problems for Biden. If a Republican like Santos can win this … Further, there is the question of the migrant issue — one that will be exploited in ‘24 as the crime issue (so effective in the Ron Johnson WI Senate race) was during the midterms. The migrant issue, endlessly harped up[on by the city tabloids (see below) will be a major issue. It is already being messaged as such in urban laboratories across the country by the GOP. And in NY3 — home to the NY Post, talk radio WABC and Fox News — the migrant issue comes fully to bear with Creedmore. Creedmore is a former mental health facility in the district that has been turned, controversially, into a migrant center. The area where it rests is deeply Democrat, and deeply residential, leaving the migrants to spend all day in a residential neighborhood. Will the Republicans manage to hold the seat using the Archie Bunker argument?
Of the “Archie Bunker argument,” I wrote:
Make no mistake about it, however — the Republicans smell blood in the water. The 1,000 unit Asylum Center at the site of the Creedmoor Psychiatric center in the heart of New York’s 3rd Congressional district is on their radar. As I posted earlier in the week, posters are turning up throughout George Santos’s district concerning the center and home values. The Archie Bunker argument, I called it, because anxiety over the property value of the fictional Bunker house at 704 Hauser Street in Queens as well as race were recurring themes of the show. One of the big questions of the 2024 election Republicans will be asking in NY3 will be how the Asylum center affects their sense of safety and their residential property values.
Biden won this district handily, 60-37%. But the migrant issue is something, clearly, to watch. Santos beat a Democrat in the midterms, so anything is possible with the right messaging. The district is not as African-American as it once was (hence: Santos) and was very influenced by the GOP’s messaging on crime (hence, again: Santos). Could the district flip? Could a depressed African-American vote — discontent over Harris not being on the ticket — lead it to?
All of this is why, imho, Harris has to stay on the ticket. And I think the President knows this.