Inside Trump’s electoral firewall

PHILADELPHIA — There are really only three states that will decide the presidential election: Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Georgia.

If Vice President Kamala Harris can’t carry Pennsylvania, her only hope is on a Southern strategy. Harris must win either Georgia or North Carolina. She has no other path to the White House. The election could well be determined when polls close in the eastern time zone. (Well, yes, after the ballots are all counted.)

This isn’t to say the other four battlegrounds — Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada and Arizona — aren’t important. If Harris loses Pennsylvania, which her aides acknowledge is a highly challenging state, she’d still need to pick up one of the two Western states as well as one of the two Southern states to win — so long as she carries Michigan and Wisconsin.

Yet none of those other four battlegrounds are relevant if Trump first blocks her in Pennsylvania, Georgia and North Carolina.

It’s the most obvious route for the former president and a reminder of the advantage the Electoral College can confer on a Republican. Should Trump defeat Harris in Pennsylvania, a state President Joe Biden spent much of his childhood in and still only carried by about 80,000 votes, her hopes then hinge on a pair of slightly right-of-center states Democrats have carried once each in this century: North Carolina (won by Barack Obama in 2008) and Georgia, which lined up with Biden in 2024.

“It comes down to seven battleground states, you got to win four of them in order to carry it,” Republican National Committee Chair Michael Whatley told me. “Except if you win Georgia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania, then that’s going to get you over the hump.”

Trump’s television advertising reflects his focus on the trio. He’s spent the most in Pennsylvania, not surprising given its pivotal nature and six media markets, and the second most in Georgia. Last week, he dumped $17 million in North Carolina, a state where he had not made extensive advertising buys for the rest of the campaign.

“With big reservations coming in for North Carolina, I’d be surprised if there wasn’t a big reservation coming in next from one of the Trump super PACs,” said Kurt Pickhardt, a GOP media consultant citing data from National Media Insights, a Republican-aligned media intelligence agency. “He’s trying to block off her Southern route.”

The Trump strategy is not lost on Harris’s strategists.

“From inference you can see where they’re thinking their bread is buttered,” said Quentin Fulks, the vice president’s deputy campaign manager.

If Trump’s best chance to wall off Harris from 270 electoral votes is clear enough to both campaigns, it’s also not lost on them that the vice president at least has more options than Biden. Before ending his campaign in July, the president was almost certainly was going to depend on a Great Lakes-only strategy, his hopes hinging on being able to retain Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Harris, though, has an insurance policy in the South. And she may need it: Trump’s polling, at least before last week’s debate, has consistently had him leading Harris in Pennsylvania, even when the modeling was tilted toward what one Republican called the campaign’s “worst-case scenario.”

Democratic internal polling, also, makes clear why Pennsylvania is the most difficult of the Great Lakes states for them. A survey earlier this month in Rep. Susan Wild’s (D-Pa,) Lehigh Valley district, perhaps the purplest of the purple in the state, showed Harris trailing by a single point

A narrow Pennsylvania loss could prove moot, though, if Harris is able to make inroads with perhaps the two most pivotal constituencies in the Southern states: Black men and moderate Republicans.

It was no accident at last week’s debate that Harris, after pointedly dismissing Trump’s crude attacks on her racial identity and asking for the next question in an August CNN interview, this time unspooled three examples of the former president’s history of race-baiting. She needs to dampen Trump’s appeal with Black men, which is modest but crucial, and push his overall support among Black voters closer to the single digits.

Similarly, there was a reason why former Rep. Liz Cheney used North Carolina’s Duke University as the setting to unveil her support for the vice president. Harris’ campaign is pouring considerable resources into targeting what political professionals call “soft Republicans,” the sort of onetime George W. Bush voters who are uneasy with Trump but still reluctant to vote for a Democrat they know little about.

As has so often been the case since his political rise, Trump is unwittingly helping his opponents in the two Southern states.

His fury at Brian Kemp, Georgia’s popular Republican governor, isn’t contained and efforts by intermediaries haven’t fully eased tensions. To wit: Trump, remarkably, has not been back to Georgia since Aug. 3, the day he used an Atlanta rally to take after Kemp, infuriating Republicans there.
This has, naturally, alarmed party officials. And Kemp allies want more from Trump. But they were heartened to hear Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), Trump’s running mate, heaping praise on the governor Monday night when the two men appeared together in Georgia at an event sponsored by Ralph Reed, the longtime Republican organizer.

Of course, former Vice President Mike Pence was often just as solicitous of the Republicans Trump tangled with and it did little to change the former president’s conduct.

What many Georgia Republicans are wondering: what will Cobb County look like? The historically Republican, but Democratic-tilting, exurban Atlanta jurisdiction turned out very differently for the top of the Democratic ticket in 2022. Will Harris finish more like Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.), who carried Cobb by 17 points, or Stacey Abrams, who only defeated Kemp by five points there. The answer could determine who carries Georgia.

In North Carolina, Trump has undermined his own cause by helping to elevate a candidate for governor in his own bombastic image. The litany of outrageous and offensive things Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson has said, particularly about women, has North Carolina Democrats hoping they can motivate moderate voters to effectively pull a straight Democratic ticket.

In fact, given Vance’s now-infamous comments about “childless cat ladies,” it’s almost as if the three leading Republican candidates were built in a lab to offend female voters — and make North Carolina attainable for Democrats.

Harris officials have grown bullish on North Carolina, coming to see it nearly as winnable as Georgia, even though North Carolina has fewer Black voters. Longtime North Carolina Democrats, though, are more restrained, having seen so many promising presidential and Senate races go down to narrow defeat since 2008 there.

As one top Tar Heel Democrat put it to me: “I like her momentum, but he’s got the fundamentals.”

Yet, as Vance said last weekend when he dipped into Greenville for an East Carolina football game, “It’s very hard for us to win unless we’re able to get North Carolina.”