The following is a lightly edited transcript of the October 23 episode of The Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
With two weeks to go until election day, the presidential race couldn’t be closer. But if Kamala Harris is to win, how exactly would that happen? What’s the path to defeating Donald Trump? Veteran political journalist Ron Brownstein has a new piece in The Atlantic laying out what Harris’s path to victory does look like. The short version is that she has to run up truly massive margins in cities and affluent suburbs while limiting Trump’s gains among nonwhite and working-class white voters. That may sound unsurprising, but the details on how this might actually unfold are complicated, interesting, fraught with bizarre uncertainties, and actually plausible, if difficult. So we invited Brownstein on the show to explain all of it. Great to have you back on, Ron.
Ron Brownstein: Greg, thanks for having me again.
Sargent: The basic geography of this race is that the most plausible path for Harris is to win the blue wall states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin as always. This requires piling up huge margins in places like Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, Madison, and Detroit. But critically, you report that the Harris campaign actually believes they have room to grow in the suburbs around these places because suburbanites, women in particular, are really recoiling from Trump right now. Can you walk us through all these details?
Brownstein: Trump won the three states by a little less than 80,000 votes. Biden won them by about 260,000 votes. Each time, they were the pivot. I still believe they are the pivot. Now, Harris is a lot more competitive than Biden was in the Sun Belt battlegrounds of North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada, but it’s not clear that she can actually get over the top in any of them except Nevada, which means that, in all likelihood, the most comfortable path—let’s put it that way for Democrats—is winning Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, states with a lot of similarities economically, culturally, demographically.
If you go back to 2020, Biden improved a little over Hillary Clinton in the big urban centers, but the big gain for him were in white collar suburbs around those major cities. The four suburban counties outside Philadelphia, he blew the doors off in those counties.
Sargent: Ron, you calculated that Biden won those four counties by almost 300,000 votes total, right?
Brownstein: Yes, 115,000 votes more than even [Hillary] Clinton did. Same thing, Oakland County outside of Detroit—the white collar bookend to Macomb County, which is the blue collar suburb of Detroit that became famous in the 1980s as the home of the Reagan Democrats; we, at some points in the ’90s, talk about Oakland as the home of the Clinton Republicans, and it’s moved further toward the Democrats—Biden won that by about twice as big a vote margin as Hillary Clinton did. Then you have the so-called WOW counties—Waukesha, Ozaukee, and Washington—outside of Milwaukee. Biden lost them by about 10,000 votes fewer than Clinton did, and pushed up the margin in Gaines County, which is Madison, and its prosperous, very white collar suburbs. That was how Biden won the states.
Now, if you think about where we are in 2024, Trump is going to do very well in Trump country. He’s running this time against a woman of color rather than the 80-year-old Catholic white guy. They have pounded her pretty effectively in October, in a way that I’m not sure they fully responded to effectively as their generic take-off-the-shelf campaign against any Democrat. She’s a cultural liberal extremist who won’t keep you safe on crime and immigration. It would not surprise me if, in the smaller parts of smaller communities across all three states, which are mostly populated by white voters without a college degree, that Trump increases his margins a little bit, at least a little bit over what he had last time.
Then you’ve got the central cities, and that is a crucial battlefield because we have all this conflicting polling information about whether Trump really is on track to improve with noncollege, nonwhite voters, especially men. My sense, after being in Detroit, is that a lot of those voters are feeling really economically squeezed by the last four years. I would not be shocked if he did at least a little better, although probably not as well as a lot of these polls are suggesting.
Sargent: In those suburban areas around Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, Madison, Detroit, there’s room for Harris to grow. Where are we now, where do think she can get to, and why is there room to grow?
Brownstein: The pincer movement from Trump [is] stronger in the small towns, maybe a little bit stronger in the central cities. How does Harris respond? She has to max out in those big inner suburbs. In 2022, all of the governor candidates in those states—Whitmer, Shapiro, Evers—ran better among not only ... especially they ran better among college educated white women than Biden had done two years earlier. They generally ran a little better among college men than Biden had done two years earlier, and most of them ran even better among college, noncollege white women who are plentiful in these suburbs too. Now, 2022 was the first election after Dobbs. Dobbs had not happened yet in 2020. Trump was not quite as openly xenophobic, racist, authoritarian, and vulgar as he has been in that period. So if you look at the precedent of 2022, at the governor’s races in particular, the message it sends is that Biden 2020 is not the ceiling for Harris in these white-collar suburbs that are very populous around the major cities. She has the opportunity to, and may very well need to, increase her vote in those places to offset what could be further consolidation of Trump country and at least some cracks in the armor or in the wall inside the central........