Contrary to initial projections, the Democratic Party’s most promising route to victory in the 2024 Presidential Election may lie in the Rust Belt states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. This surprising shift in strategy is the consensus among a wide range of Democratic strategists.
President Joe Biden’s 2020 victories in Arizona and Georgia, states with rapidly diversifying populations, seemed to indicate a future Democratic reliance on Sun Belt states. However, recent polls suggest that Biden’s support among White voters remains steady, while his popularity among Black and Latino voters is waning. This unexpected pattern makes the older, predominantly White Rust Belt states a more viable option for Biden.
Democratic pollster Ben Tulchin, who served as the lead pollster in Sen. Bernie Sanders’ two presidential campaigns, noted the unusual situation. “We are now in this bizarre situation where we are doing relatively better in states with less diverse population,” he said.
If Biden successfully defends his 2020 victories in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, he could reach the required 270 Electoral College votes, even if he loses in Arizona, Nevada, and Georgia. These states are considered the most vulnerable among the 25 he won last time.
James Carville, a veteran Democratic strategist, emphasized the importance of these Rust Belt states. “We used to say in 2020 it was Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin and everything else is lagniappe, which is a New Orleans term that means ‘a little something extra,’” Carville said.
Current issue trends are also pushing Democrats towards the Rust Belt states. Biden’s strong support for legal abortion resonates powerfully among college-educated White voters, especially women. Conversely, economic issues are more significant for most non-white voters, a challenging dynamic for Biden in the Sun Belt due to widespread discontent with his economic management.
Despite the shifting focus, Biden’s campaign is investing equally in both Rust Belt and Sun Belt battlegrounds. “We view this as a race with multiple paths to victory and we view it as an imperative, and an opportunity, for the campaign to develop scale everywhere,” said Dan Kanninen, the Biden campaign’s battleground states director.
However, public polling shows Biden’s position is generally stronger in the Rust Belt. In most surveys, he’s running better in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin than in any battleground state. By contrast, polls consistently show Trump leading in the big Sun Belt battlegrounds that Biden flipped in 2020 – Arizona and Georgia – as well as in North Carolina, which Biden hopes to put in play.
Michigan is the potentially decisive outlier – a critical Rust Belt state where polls for months have showed Biden trailing. This general alignment upends the expectations of many political operatives and analysts, myself included, after Trump emerged as the GOP’s dominant figure in 2016.
The key to these Democratic Sun Belt gains have been the twin demographic forces reshaping the region. Democrats have significantly improved their performance in growing well-educated upper-middle-income communities across the Sun Belt. As important, the Sun Belt states have been racially diversifying at a far more rapid pace than the Rust Belt states.
However, this contrast means that Democrats rely on minority voters for a much larger share of their total vote in the Sun Belt states than they do in the Rust Belt battlegrounds. And that’s made them more vulnerable to the striking pattern in most public polls this year that has found Biden largely holding his 2020 support among White voters, but running well below his previous numbers among Black and particularly Latino voters.
The biggest question for Democrats in the Sun Belt states is whether they can push Trump off the beachheads he has established among minority voters. The Biden campaign points out that voters of color, especially Latinos in the southwest, often fully tune in later in the campaign. Biden is pursuing Black and Latino voters with unprecedented levels of targeted early media.
But Biden’s efforts begin with him facing much more skepticism among voters of color than Democrats usually confront. Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini said Trump doesn’t even need to maintain all his current inroads with minority voters to make these states very difficult for Biden.
Biden’s relatively stronger position in most of the Rust Belt battlegrounds continues a story of unexpected Democratic resilience in the area. Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin were all part of what I called, in 2009, the “blue wall.” Those were the 18 states that ultimately voted Democratic in all six presidential elections from Bill Clinton’s first win in 1992 to Barack Obama’s reelection in 2012.
Trump’s success at knocking Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin out of the blue wall by a combined margin of about 78,000 votes was the key to his surprise victory in 2016. But since his victory, Democrats have regained the initiative in each state – at least until now.
Democrats stabilized their position in the Rust Belt states by exceeding expectations among Whites on both sides of the education divide. After Trump’s blow-out win in 2016 among White voters without a college education, Biden in 2020 clawed back a critical few points among those voters.
In 2024, the large number of blue-collar jobs flowing from the big three bills that Biden passed to promote more domestic manufacturing and infrastructure construction could help him maintain a competitive floor of support with these voters.
Even more important, Democrats in the Trump era have consolidated commanding advantages in well-educated suburbs across the region that once leaned Republican. In Michigan, for instance, Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in 2022 won over 60% of the vote in affluent Oakland County outside Detroit, even a wider margin than Biden notched there in 2020.
Strong support for legalized abortion could allow Biden to run even better among college-educated White voters across the region in 2024 than he did in his first race. In 2022, the Democratic gubernatorial candidates in all three states exceeded Biden’s performance from two years earlier with both college-educated White men and women, the exit polls found.
Lower margins and reduced turnout among Black voters is still a risk for Democrats in the three critical Rust Belt states, just as in Georgia and North Carolina. But in the Rust Belt states, Democrats lately have shown they can survive disappointing performances in Detroit, Philadelphia, and Milwaukee by increasing their margins in the white-collar suburbs and cutting their losses in blue-collar areas.
On the possible Rust Belt path to 270 Election College votes, Michigan looms as the potential heartbreak hill for Democrats. Biden faces two additional risks that make Michigan more precarious for him than the other two core Rust Belt battlegrounds.
One is the possibility that Trump can expand his support among working-class Whites by portraying the Biden-backed transition toward electric vehicles as a threat to the domestic car industry. The other unique complication is the discontent among the state’s large Arab American population over the war between Israel and Hamas.
A Trump win in Michigan is hardly guaranteed: Biden won it by about 155,000 votes in 2020, a much larger margin than in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, and Whitmer carried it by double digits as recently as 2022. But if Michigan does slip away from Biden, finding a replacement that lifts him to 270 Electoral College votes will be challenging, even if he holds Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
To offset losing Michigan, Biden would need a big Sun Belt breakthrough: winning either Georgia or North Carolina, or both Arizona and Nevada. None of that looks easy, which is why many Democrats view a Rust Belt sweep as the most plausible road to victory for Biden.
If the president can defend those three states, “you are not going to lose,” said Carville. “And if you don’t do this you are going to have to catch an inside straight to win.”