Kamala Harris is out campaigning at long last, but her schedule this week doesn't seem to include the swing states of the South.
Instead of campaigning in North Carolina (16 electoral college votes) and Georgia (16 votes), she's focused on Arizona (11 votes), Nevada (6 votes) and Pennsylvania (19 votes) this week.
Pennsylvania, I can understand. It's hotly contested. But her lunge for the Western states over the Southern states suggests maybe her chances aren't quite as good as she'd like. Or perhaps just as likely, she's alarmed at the inroads made by the Trump side of the contest in those Western redoubts, particularly Arizona, where Trump reportedly leads, polls show.
According to the New York Times:
Voters across the Sun Belt say that Donald J. Trump improved their lives when he was president — and worry that a Kamala Harris White House would not — setting the stage for an extraordinarily competitive contest in three key states, according to the latest polls from The New York Times and Siena College.
The polls found that Mr. Trump has gained a lead in Arizona and remains ahead in Georgia, two states that he lost to President Biden in 2020. But in North Carolina, which has not voted for a Democrat since 2008, Ms. Harris trails Mr. Trump by just a narrow margin.
The polls of these three states, taken from Sept. 17 to 21, presented further evidence that in a sharply divided nation, the presidential contest is shaping up to be one of the tightest in history.
So she's thrashing for a lead in these three swing states and she needs at least some of them to gain the 270 electoral college votes it takes to win, and she goes to the state with the lowest number of electoral college votes? The one where, according to CNN, Republican voter registrations over Democrat voter registrations have doubled to a six-point lead over the last election? The one where ads are being run by Catholic organizations, advising their large blocs of voters in the state of Harris's nasty record of singling Catholics out for persecutory legislation and lawfare?
It almost looks like the race is actually lost to her in Arizona, where as the Times notes, Trump is ahead, yet she's fighting to win Arizona instead of one of the other swing states with bigger electoral college numbers and easier odds?
Oh, you could note that she's also trying for Nevada since it's in the neighborhood apparently -- campaigning and winning in those two states together would get her 17 electoral votes, which is one vote more than either North Carolina or Georgia all by themselves could provide.
But like Arizona, Nevada seems like it might be a tough nut for Kamala to crack. More so than other states, including swing states, the state of the economy is a very big deal in Nevada.
According to NPR:
Schoenmann said the economy is top of mind. Most here have experienced cost of living increases since the pandemic.
Nevada also has the highest unemployment out of any state in the country at 5.4% with 6.7% in the Las Vegas area, compared to the national average of 4.2%.
With much of Southern Nevada — which includes Las Vegas — living on tips, higher prices “can really hit home,” Schoenmann said.
In addition, Nevada is growing fast — with an estimated 30% of new residents moving from California.
“They’re selling their homes in California for large sums of money. So they come here, they are buying homes over the asking price. And they’re driving up housing costs,” Schoenmann reported.
Nevada is the Trump economy advantage cubed, something she can never explain nor giggle her way out of to voters with this foremost on their minds.
So what we are seeing is that she could spend the same amount of time in Georgia and North Carolina to try to win, and if she does win, she takes home 32 electoral votes for her time spent.
But she's going for Arizona and Nevada with half as many votes instead.
It seems kind of weak to have to try to win two states instead of just one which could be done by winning either Georgia or North Carolina for the same amount of work.
That's kind of interesting. It makes me wonder if she has written those places off.
Or is she so confident she has them in the bag she can now focus on the Western swing states? I find that latter scenario harder to believe than the former one.
Oh, sure, she has hubby-poo Doug Emhoff out campaigning in North Carolina, but it's hard to see how a Hollywood entertainment lawyer who knocked up the nanny in his last marriage is going to make much of a difference over what she could do there herself.
More ominous still (for her), she's got him campaigning in Virginia for her, which up until now, hadn't been a state in play at all. That sounds like a rear-guard action.
So it's off to Arizona and Nevada for Kamala Harris, attempting to tell the Nevada voters the economy's great, or if it's not great, Trump did it, while in Arizona, she gets to tell everyone why she's not such a big Catholic-hater after all.
It makes no sense unless one can surmise that Democrats are probably panicking, fearful, as this Hill story indicates, that pollsters are undercounting her support as they did for the Democrat candidate in 2016, and repeating the same mistake now.
If that's the case, then Trump has smooth sailing ahead for him. Maybe he will have a good horse laugh as he takes the Southern states handily and watches Kamala fall flat on her face out west. Sure, it may be wishful thinking. But how else do we explain her apparent writing off of the vote-rich South?
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