Expanding the Map: Why are the Campaigns Talking about Winning States They (Likely) Won't Win?
May 7, 2024
In the past few weeks, the Trump campaign has floated that they think they can win Minnesota and Virginia while the Biden campaign has done the same about North Carolina and Florida. One side winning just one of these states would likely tip (or signal the tipping of) the entire election in their favor. We hear a lot of nonsense out of campaigns. Sometimes it is hot air designed to deflect bad news or craft a narrative. Sometimes it is delusional. Sometime it turns out not to be nonsense at all. Is there any reason to believe either campaign about any of these states?
I’ll only really believe states like Florida, Minnesota, and Virginia are in play if the candidate that won each state in 2020 feels compelled to commit significant resources to defending them.
Kondik is correct. I’ve noted this before: watch what campaigns do with their resources, not what they say. A notable exception to this axiom was Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign when they tried to expand the map to Arizona at the end of the campaign. It’s the exception that proves the rule. Campaigns will move resources where their best data – usually internal polling – tells them they have the best chance to make a difference. That can be moving resources to win a state, but also moving them to defend it. So, while the campaigns chatter on about expanding the map to Minnesota or Florida, don’t assume this means they actually think either of those states will flip this year.
But there are other reasons for focusing on states that a candidate will not win. One reason is to convince your opponent you know something about a state they think is in their column that they don’t know. By making your opponent think they could lose this state, they might move resources into it that would be better spent elsewhere. It’s not just a fake-out; if one campaign moves resources into a state and the other campaign ignores that investment, it risks turning a win into a loss. Again, see Clinton (2016) in Wisconsin and Michigan.
Another reason to talk up one’s chances in flipping a state is to motivate and inspire supporters – for fundraising, volunteering, and getting out voters. It’s hard to overestimate how important optimism can be for a winning campaign. Campaigns are long. The work is exhausting. Campaigns rely on seemingly unending amounts of volunteer work and donated money. Optimism can be fuel for the exhausted.
Okay. So the Trump campaign is telling supporters it can win Minnesota and Virginia and the Biden campaign is doing the same with North Carolina and Florida. What does this mean right now?
There is a difference in the approaches each campaign is taking. The Trump campaign is selling a very unrealistic scenario in an attempt to motivate big donors. The news we have of this comes from “leaked” impressions of a presentation to supporters in a closed door meeting. Apparently, Trump’s pollster, Tony Fabrizio, has data to support the idea that Minnesota and Virginia can be flipped this year. I bet he does. I can make that argument with existing publicly-available data myself, although it would only be superficially persuasive (for instance, Virginia elected a Republican governor in 2021; Minnesota’s vote in 2020 was kind of close and it is kind of culturally similar to Wisconsin). Fabrizio is a good pollster, so I doubt he really believes either state will flip this year, but he can probably find some kernels of good news in his polling to focus on.
The Biden campaign’s motives seem much more pragmatic – that is, the campaign is not simply trying to create a perception. Does that mean Biden might win Florida? Probably not. But North Carolina can absolutely be competitive. The reason Kondick left out North Carolina in the quote at the head of this post is because Biden nearly won the state in 2020. Trump beat Biden by 1.3 points. North Carolina is every bit as much a battleground state as are Wisconsin and Arizona.
But what’s going on with Florida? There are a few possibilities, and all of them might be true. First, while Florida has gone for Trump in the last two elections, Democrats have won it as recently as 2012. Elections there are not landslides for either side at the presidential level. It’s not crazy to imagine that Florida could come back to the Democratic camp this year, it just doesn’t seem likely when we look at election results in state and federal races over the past eight years.
That leads us to a second consideration: abortion politics. Just last week, Florida’s abortion ban went into place. Technically, one may get an abortion up to six weeks of pregnancy, but as many medical experts and advocates have noted that is essentially a ban since many women may not even know they are pregnant before the prohibition sets in. Advocates have successfully placed a measure (Amendment 4) on the Florida ballot for November that will reverse the ban and allow for reproductive freedom until fetal viability or when necessary to protect the life of the mother as determined by her healthcare provider. We have seen abortion measures win by large margins in states like Ohio and Kansas since the Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade. Some Democratic operatives certainly think this will help turnout the Democratic vote in Florida in November, and could make the difference for Biden.
Let’s face it: if Biden wins Florida, he wins the election.
No Republican can win today without Texas and Florida, just like no Democrat can win without California and New York. The challenge for Republicans is that there is more reason to think Biden could win Florida than Trump could even be competitive in California or New York. This brings us to a third consideration and one that is similar to Trump’s motives in trying to convince supporters he can win Minnesota: fundraising. The idea that Biden could win Florida could excite big donors to give more to the campaign. It may even do the same for small donors. Plus, Florida is a state with big donors living in it, and folks like to believe that their state can support their candidate if people just “believed.”
There is one last reason why Biden may be focusing on Florida: to illustrate what a MAGA Republican government looks like. Republicans have long used San Francisco, and more recently California, as an example for what a (presumably scary) Democratic national government would look like. Perhaps Biden is going to turn the tables on the Republicans with this tactic. Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) has devoted his administration to turning the Sunshine State into a extreme right winger’s dream: attacking his enemies (real and perceived), outlawing abortion, banning books and history, ever-expanding gun rights, as well as a whole host of performative nonsense like banning lab-grown meat. It won’t be difficult for Biden to point at Florida and say, “you don’t want your state to become this, do you?”
This kind of “Florida-as-a-warning” message might complicate an effort to actually win the state, but then I guess that will depend on where the campaign really invests its resources. If the Biden campaign really thinks they can win Florida, they will invest in winning. And if they are right, presumably the Trump campaign will figure it out too and move resources there to defend the state. Time will tell.