Traveling Campaign Volunteers: States You Should Be Considering for this Fall
June 12, 2024
Several people have asked me in the past few days for some ideas about where to travel to do campaign work this fall. If you are a long-time reader of this newsletter, you’ll remember that it started out as a way to help traveling campaign volunteers maximize their impact. Considering we are about half-way through June, I decided to push back to Friday the line warming post I had planned for today. The second post in the labor politics series will appear after next week’s youth voting series.
We’ll dig into these states deeper as we get further into the election and the races take form. For now, I want give a simple tiered summary of states you should be looking at if you want to travel and help out in October and November. The first tier will be what I think are the most important states for a Democratic victory in November. The second tier contains states that are on the bubble. They could go either way, but they may not make a difference to who wins unless Biden loses some states in tier one. The last tier is for the folks who want to do something out-of-the-box that will have impact. I know you are out there – I get asked all the time why we aren’t focusing more on them. Democrats likely won’t win them in 2024, but it’s not as crazy to imagine as some people might think.
Tier 1: Michigan; Pennsylvania; Wisconsin; Arizona; Nevada
I don’t think any of these states will come as a surprise, but they are the most important battleground states for those of you who want to make as big an impact as you can this fall. The Blue Wall states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin famously fell in 2016 costing Hillary Clinton the Electoral College. Biden regained them in 2020. For many years before then, they were reliably Democratic states at the presidential level. If Biden wins these and holds all non-battleground states this year, he will win. These five states are important this year for another reason: each of them has a Senate race. While none of them are likely losses for Democrats they will probably all be close - and a Republican victory or two (or more) is possible. Republicans winning any of these races almost certainly means they will capture the Senate.
If Biden wins the Blue Wall states, he will likely win reelection. It’s become somewhat of an urban legend that Georgia and Arizona were must-win states for Biden in 2020, probably because how much of a fuss Trump made over them (which likely had more to do with his insecurity over losing states he thought were automatic for him, but there are some darker reasons1). Biden would have won the election with 273 electoral votes in 2020 if he lost Georgia and Arizona and Nevada. Due to reapportionment after the 2020 Census, if this is the 2024 scenario, he will win 270 electoral votes - exactly the number he needs.
This is why Republicans are trying to change the law in Nebraska to make it a winner-take-all state. If that happens, Biden does not win NB-02’s one electoral vote the election is tied at 269, which then means the House picks the president. There has been talk in Maine about changing their system if Nebraska does, which would then eliminate ME-02’s one electoral vote for Trump and putting it back to a win for Biden with 270. At the moment, it does not look like Nebraska is going to change its system.2
That’s why Arizona and Nevada are important. If Biden wins the Blue Wall states and one of these states, it doesn’t matter what Nebraska does. To be clear, I am not predicting that the election will be this close. But it could. And when you are considering where to place you efforts, this is a good way to look at it.
Tier 2: North Carolina; Georgia; Minnesota
There are no Senate races in these states, so the impact of your work is significantly lessened. However, a Biden win in North Carolina or Georgia likely signals a national victory. A Trump victory in Minnesota would spell real problems for Biden. The vote will be close in all three states, with Biden likely winning by the biggest margin in Minnesota, although it may only be about four points. The other two states will be close, and we have to plan for them to be Trump victories even though Biden could win both.
If any of these states are easier for you to travel to, then it is definitely worth doing so rather than not volunteering at all. Particularly Minnesota. I say this because losing Minnesota blows up the Tier 1 Blue Wall strategy. Biden needs to win Minnesota in order for the Blue Wall strategy to work. He can afford to lose North Carolina and Georgia, but obviously winning those would help ensure a Democratic victory. And it is harder to see how Trump can win if he loses these states.
Tier 3: Texas; Florida
If Biden wins either of these states, the race is not just over - he will win handily and it may signal the beginning of a significant electoral shift towards the Democratic Party. There are reasons to be optimistic about both states, but your efforts will likely make a difference more in the tier 1 and 2 states.
The chances that Biden and that the Democratic Senate nominee will win either state are low, but not non-existent. There is a lot of temptation to work in these states; both states have large electoral votes that if moved into the Democratic column would foreclose any reasonable path to victory for a Republican presidential nominee. Texas is not the dominantly Republican state that its government acts like it is, and demographics continue to threaten GOP dominance in elections.3 Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) is running for reelection, and I’ve never met a Democratic leaning voter who didn’t want to see him booted out of office. Democrats have a good candidate in Rep. Colin Allen, but they have had good candidates before and lost.
Florida has been much closer in presidential elections than people probably realize, but most of the time the Republican has won (Obama did win in 2008 and 2012). Biden seems to be about five points behind Trump in the current polling, which is not insurmountable this far out from the election but history tells it will be a quite a lift to get past the post. However, there has been some interesting polling news in the Senate race this week. Florida Atlantic University has a new poll out today that shows the Florida Senate race getting close. In April, FAU had Sen. Rick Scott (R) up by 17 points over likely Democratic nominee Debbie Mucarsel-Powell. Today, Scott has a two point lead among likely voters (45-43). This is a big shift in the race.
Why waste time where we are probably going to lose?
One thing I noticed over the past few election cycles is what we might call the reverse Amy McGrath effect. McGrath was the Democratic nominee against Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) in 2020. She was the darling of party activists, who poured tens of millions of dollars into her campaign. She got 38.23% of the vote. McConnell was not going to lose. Sure, no one likes him. But that’s always been true, and he still wins. As a result, many people criticized the amount of money and time people spent on McGrath’s campaign. Those resources, these folks contend, would have been better used elsewhere. That seems sensible on the face of it, but do things really work that way? What happens if we only put resources in the races we need to win or will likely win anyway?
The reverse Amy McGrath effect is that resources get diverted to races that have high expectations for victory, but are not actually needed there or cannot be operationalized by the campaigns. I have volunteered on many occasions to do text-banks and other GOTV work in battleground states only to find out that so many other people were doing the same, there was no work left to do. In those cases, I would have been better off helping out Democrats in states like Texas and Florida. It could not have done worse than doing nothing in a battleground state. Perhaps some of the campaigns can try to coordinate this work so when there is an overflow of help in, say, Wisconsin, people are directed to help out in Texas (assuming the help isn’t needed in other battleground states).
Shifting work is easy enough when your volunteer work is virtual. But if you are going to travel somewhere, you need to pick a place and make that work. The same we-have-enough-volunteers problem can exist in person too. Campaigns just don’t send people out on the doors without training, supervision, and vetted turf maps. If too many people show up, it means either people don’t work or everyone gets done sooner than planned - either way, it means fewer actual person-hours of volunteer work getting done.
Work to get out the vote regardless of where you are this year!
There is a very important additional reason to work to get out the vote everywhere this year – at least as concerns the presidential race – and that is legitimacy. Republicans have made it very clear at this point that they will not accept election results unless they win. They even complain about rigged elections when other Republicans on the same ballot win their elections. So it is important to drive up the vote for Biden everywhere so that he has a convincing popular vote victory – the kind that most Americans will agree is a clear win.
Conventional wisdom (and, to be fair, some actual electoral math) suggests that Biden cannot win the Electoral College with a narrow popular vote win. He needs a margin of a few points because of the way votes are weighted in the Electoral College. So the idea that Biden might lose the popular vote, but win the Electoral College seems like fantasy. However, it is not. Recent polling from CBS News/YouGov finds that there is a significant enthusiasm gap for Biden in safe states while the enthusiasm is much better - and running about even with Trump - in battleground states. If this holds, a scenario where Biden ekes out small victories in battleground states while winning safe Democratic states by smaller margins and losing safe Republican states by bigger margins could translate into a popular vote win for Trump while Biden accumulates a winning 270 electoral votes. I am sure you can imagine how Republicans, MAGAland, and their street gangs and propaganda network will react to that.
One important reason that most Americans have never believed the Big Lie is because Biden won by 7 million votes. Unfortunately, this is not a year anyone can afford to cast a protest vote in a safe state. While all votes will not matter for the Electoral College outcome, they will for the public legitimacy of the election.
Georgia in particular was part of Trump’s attempt to get the Supreme Court to overturn the election. Justice Clarence Thomas was the single justice overseeing Georgia then and there is reason to believe Trump’s infamous call to Georgia’s Secretary of State was to encourage him to declare widespread voter fraud and put a case in front of Thomas in which he would enjoin the votes and get the entire Court to review the election. It probably would not have happened that way even if the Secretary of State had gone along with Trump, but it would have created even more chaos as January 6th approached.
The state stills has time to call a special session of the state legislature to change the law – and the only Constitutional requirement is that it would have to be done before Election Day in November.
This is probably why Texas Republicans are trying to change the way statewide officials are elected – by requiring them to win a majority of the 254 counties.