Opinion | To win, Kamala Harris needs Joe Biden’s coalition, not Barack Obama’s

Twelve years ago, Florida and Ohio were swing states. Obama campaigned frequently in both states and won them. He won relatively easy victories in Iowa (by six percentage points), Michigan (10), Pennsylvania (five), and Wisconsin (seven). He finished ahead of former Massachusetts governor (and current Utah senator) Mitt Romney in a lot of small counties in Iowa and Wisconsin.

In 2020, Joe Biden also won 51 percent of the national vote. But the way Biden did it was significantly different: He lost Iowa, Ohio, and Florida. He narrowly won Michigan (by three points), Pennsylvania (by one), and Wisconsin (by one), and fared much worse than Obama in many small Midwestern districts. He only got about 35 percent of the national vote in rural areas and among white people without a college degree.

But Biden won Arizona and Georgia, two states that Obama had barely carried. He finished well ahead of Donald Trump in Colorado and Virginia, states that had narrowly gone for Obama. Biden lost Texas by just six percentage points, compared to Obama’s 16-point defeat in 2012. People living in the suburbs and white college-educated voters supported Biden more than Obama.

You probably already knew some of this, but it’s worth pointing out: Barack Obama of Harvard Law School and Chicago did better with rural voters and white Americans without a college degree, but worse among white college graduates than Joe Biden of Scranton and Syracuse Law. Obama outperformed Biden in the fairly white Upper Midwest; Biden ran ahead of Obama in very multiracial Arizona, Georgia and Texas.

These somewhat contradictory results are likely not the result of specific campaign tactics by Obama or Biden, but of broader changes in American politics. The urban-rural divide (people in cities voting Democratic, people in small towns voting Republican) was huge in 2012 and has grown since then. White college-educated voters now lean Democratic, while their non-college-educated counterparts are overwhelmingly Republican. It’s likely that Obama and Trump, the defining political figures of the 2010s, have helped close these cracks.

Republicans now dominate statewide elections in Florida, Iowa and Ohio. On the other hand, Arizona, Georgia and Virginia have become more Democratic. Wisconsin is perhaps the most contested state, with a Democratic governor but a Republican U.S. senator two years ago. Demographics explain some of this state-level dynamic, but not all of it. Ohio has a lot of white, rural, non-college-educated people — but so does Wisconsin.

Harris can’t reverse trends that have been building for more than a decade in a three-month campaign. So I expect her strategy will be to replicate Biden’s victory of four years ago: huge margins in urban areas; strong support in suburbs and among white voters with college degrees; deficits in rural areas and among white voters without college degrees that are slightly smaller than former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign.

Harris is likely to concentrate her time and campaign funds in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Harris’ first major campaign stop as the presumptive Democratic nominee was in West Allis, a suburb near Milwaukee; her second will be in Atlanta this week. Harris is unlikely to face as much competition in Florida, Iowa or Ohio.

It would be awkward for her campaign to say this outright, but I imagine she will try to win college-educated voters, those living in cities and suburbs, and the growing ranks of nonreligious Americans by even larger margins than Biden did. In my view, the segment of the electorate that Harris is positioned to gain ground in is best understood not as women, or white women, but as white women and men living in cities and suburbs who are not progressive on every issue but are culturally liberal and wary of Republican positions on abortion and LGBT rights.

Biden won about 73 percent of Asian, Black, and Hispanic voters combined in 2020, significantly lower than Obama won in 2012 (81 percent). That fits more in line with our stereotypes of Biden and Obama. Perhaps Harris can match Obama’s minority support. After all, there’s a lot of enthusiasm among African Americans, particularly Black women, for her candidacy. She’s also the first Asian American presidential nominee from a major party, and perhaps that will attract new support as well.

But there is growing evidence, both in election results and in polls, that Latinos and black men in particular are more open to voting Republican than they were a decade ago. Democrats other than Biden are also doing worse among voters of color. If Harris gets about 95 percent of the black vote and black turnout equals white turnout (both of which happened in 2012), I’d be surprised. I’d bet her support among voters of color is closer to 73 percent than 81. And she can win by 73 — Biden did.

Overall, Obama’s 2012 coalition was more electorally efficient than Biden’s eight years later: Obama won 332 electoral votes with 51 percent of the national vote, Biden only 306 with that same 51 percent. Even in the most optimistic scenario for Harris, she wins 319 electoral votes. (That’s all Biden won plus North Carolina, where polls showed the race neck and neck.)

But a 2024 Democratic presidential candidate is unlikely to win many small towns in Wisconsin or the state of Ohio, no matter who they are or how they campaign. Voting patterns have changed too much. Biden was never going to be the Democratic icon that Obama was. But Biden’s electoral path is likely the party’s best hope in November.