With roughly 76 days remaining before Election Day 2024, plenty of voters are eyeing electoral maps, gaming out which states the candidates and parties will need to prevail. The list of battleground states is familiar: Democrats have long believed that success in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan will be essential to a 2024 victory, while Republicans hope to reclaim Arizona, Georgia and Nevada.
But what if the map is expanding in unexpected ways?
Around this time a month ago, that’s precisely what Republicans were counting on. The Wall Street Journal highlighted a polling report from Blue Rose Research, a Democratic firm, that found President Joe Biden not only losing every battleground state, but also struggling in New Hampshire, Minnesota, New Mexico, Virginia, Maine and even New Jersey — states he won with relative ease four years ago.
A month later, Biden’s re-election effort has ended; Vice President Kamala Harris has picked up the Democratic torch; and the conversation about traditional blue states turning red has effectively run its course. It’s been replaced by a very different kind of discussion — about traditional red states possibly turning blue. Rolling Stone reported:
This month, GOP operatives and others close to Donald Trump have grown increasingly nervous over trends they’ve seen in recent private polling data produced by different Republican organizations and conservative allies. It’s not just the swing-state polling or the national surveys that are causing distress lately. The anxiety-spiking numbers are coming out of Trump strongholds like Ohio and Florida, according to three GOP sources, including two people close to the former president, who have reviewed the private polls.
The article, which hasn’t been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, quoted one GOP operative who said, in reference to the party’s internal data, “They’re looking worse than they should.”
This dovetailed with a New York Times report that noted, “Two private polls conducted in Ohio recently by Republican pollsters — which Mr. Trump carried in 2020 with 53 percent of the vote — showed him receiving less than 50 percent of the vote against Ms. Harris in the state, according to a person with direct knowledge of the data.”
As for the Sunshine State, USA Today reported last week, “The red wave that washed over Florida in recent years might not be as large as it once seemed, if a new presidential survey is any indication. Vice President Kamala Harris is within ‘striking distance’ of former President Donald Trump in Florida, according to the pollster behind a new USA TODAY/Suffolk University/WSVN-TV survey of 500 likely voters released Tuesday.”
While that poll found the GOP nominee ahead in his adopted home state by five points, a Florida Atlantic University poll released around the same time found Trump’s leads over Harris at just three points. (As is always the case, click the links for information on the surveys’ methodologies and margins of error.) To be sure, Democrats continue to see states like Ohio and Florida as aspirational electoral goals, and when the Harris campaign announced its latest round of investments, neither Florida nor Ohio were among the states where the Democratic ticket will be spending limited resources, at least not yet. But (a) that could change in the coming weeks; and (b) North Carolina was among the states Harris is targeting, despite its recent history of backing GOP candidates. In fact, Democrats appear cautiously optimistic about North Carolina — a state Trump won four years ago by just 1 percentage point — and recent polling has bolstered the party’s attitudes. In mid-July, the electoral map was expanding in ways that excited Republicans. In mid-August, there’s still some fluidity to the map, but the GOP’s excitement has turned to anxiety.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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