KEY POINTS FROM THIS ARTICLE
— In the few weeks that Vice President Kamala Harris has emerged as Democrats’ standard bearer, she has “reset” the electoral map to some degree, as she has polled better than President Biden was performing before he ended his campaign.
— We are upgrading Democrats’ chances in Minnesota, the home state of now-vice presidential candidate Gov. Tim Walz (D), as well as in similarly blue New Hampshire.
— As Harris has performed better against Donald Trump in the Sun Belt than Biden, we are moving Georgia back into the Toss-up category.
Table 1: Crystal Ball Electoral College rating changes
Map 1: Crystal Ball Electoral College ratings
Resetting the electoral map?
Yesterday, Vice President Kamala Harris, just a day after securing the Democratic Party’s official nomination for president, selected a vice presidential candidate of her own: in something of an upset pick, she tapped Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.
We’ll have more to say about the pairing later this week. But unlike Harris’s other top prospect for the second-place position, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D), Walz does not seem positioned to directly deliver a state’s electoral votes: before Walz was announced, we already had his Minnesota at Leans Democratic in the Electoral College. That said, as we discussed last week in our look at the Democratic veepstakes, the Harris campaign may be hoping that Walz may have some broader regional appeal in the Midwest—considering how he performed relative to other Democrats who came before and after him, this is probably something that worked in Barack Obama’s favor in this electorally critical region. As one smart observer pointed out, Walz is probably already known in some pockets of neighboring Wisconsin because some of its counties are in Minnesota-centric media markets. That said, if Harris comes up short in Pennsylvania—and, with it, likely the Electoral College—the Monday morning quarterbacking will be, to say the least, intense. Additionally, it’s worth noting that even the home-state vice presidential bonus is disputed, let alone some sort of broader regional benefit (we would also question a broader Midwest electoral appeal for the GOP VP nominee, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance).
In any case, it appears that at least in the short term, Harris has reversed the slippage—or has at least been able to stop the bleeding—that Democrats have seen since the Biden-Trump debate in June. Looking nationally, Harris currently leads in all national polling aggregators. When Biden left the race, he was generally polling behind Trump. Harris making the race into more of a 50-50 proposition means we should adjust our own ratings to better reflect the state of the race.
Before this week, one of the more recent changes we made to our Electoral College ratings was when we downgraded Democrats’ prospects in Walz’s Minnesota. Our reasoning was that the Gopher State was just not that much bluer than Michigan, a state we simultaneously moved in the Toss-up column. But some recent Fox News polling was telling: while Harris was tied with Trump in Michigan, her 52%-46% lead over Trump in Minnesota was close to what Biden carried the state by in 2020. Shortly after that Fox poll came out, a KSTP/SurveyUSA poll gave Harris an even more comfortable 50%-40% lead in Minnesota. So, from what we can tell, while Michigan (along with Pennsylvania and Wisconsin) remain on a knife’s edge, Minnesota is true to its usual form, as a state that typically leans a few points bluer than the nation as a whole.
Though we wrote last week that vice presidential candidates, on average, deliver only marginal home state boosts, we feel that Walz’s placement on the Democratic ticket, combined with recent polling, provides more than enough justification to move the state into a firmer rating category. We are moving Minnesota from Leans Democratic to Likely Democratic.
In the 2020 presidential election, the state that voted closest to Minnesota was New Hampshire, which was actually a few tenths of a point bluer. Though its electoral votes helped to put Republican George W. Bush in the White House in 2000, in the Trump era, New Hampshire’s federal politics have taken on a mild, but consistent, shade of blue. We would also note that with educational attainment becoming increasingly synced to voting preference, New Hampshire has a slightly more college-educated population than Minnesota. And, as with Minnesota, the sampling of Granite State polling that we’ve gotten over the last few weeks suggests an overall picture similar to that of 2020. So New Hampshire also goes from Leans Democratic to Likely Democratic.
One recent ratings change that we made came in the state that hosted the pivotal first debate: Georgia. When Biden was in the race, it seemed clear that his (narrow) path to reelection would run through the Midwest, as several Sun Belt states that he carried in 2020—specifically Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada—were slipping away. Still, we, somewhat charitably to Biden, kept Arizona, where Democrats are favored in a key Senate race and where an abortion ballot measure may help them, and Nevada, where Democrats have some history of beating their poll numbers, in the Toss-up category. But we pushed Georgia, which is hosting a relatively low-stakes set of down-ballot races this cycle, into the Leans Republican category in mid-June.
If Harris is somewhat unproven in the Midwest, one of the upsides of her candidacy, at least so far, is that she’s seemed to re-open Democrats’ Sun Belt path. While Biden had basically been stuck in the low-40s in Georgia for at least the last few months of his campaign, Harris’s numbers have typically been higher and she has run close to Trump in recent surveys. For his part, Trump has, at minimum, likely not helped his standing in Georgia by re-airing some of his long-running grievances against two of his favorite intraparty foils: Gov. Brian Kemp (R) and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R), both of whom are broadly popular in the state. So, with all this, we feel that Georgia is more of a legitimately competitive state than it was prior to Biden’s departure—we are moving it back into the Toss-up column from Leans Republican.
These changes mean that all of the electoral votes that Trump carried in 2020 continue to at least lean to him, although we do wonder if North Carolina may become a true Toss-up if Harris’s upward trajectory continues. All of the electoral votes in places where Biden did better than his 4.5-point national popular margin at least lean to Harris. The 6 states that Biden won by smaller margins than his national margin are Toss-ups.
In terms of the overall trajectory of the 2024 race, there has been no shortage of whiplash since late June. The fast-breaking developments since the debate have been a lot for those of us who follow politics for a living to process, let alone for voters who are just tuning into the campaign. Perhaps by Labor Day, when both of the party conventions will have concluded, the nature of the race will be less fluid. But for now, we feel its warranted to move at least a few states back in the Democrats’ direction.