November, 2024
Washington — The following analysis of why Kamala Harris lost battleground states Pennsylvania and Wisconsin appeared today in the New York Times. Typical of such second-guessing, it fails to attribute the losses to the obvious: Democrats' over-reliance of turning out votes in urban Democratic strongholds rather than competing for votes in non-metro areas. See previous blog "A Call to Revamp the Democratic Party."
A better analysis would be to explore why Democrats don't have the acumen or fortitude to compete in culturally rural areas where cutting their losses would result in overall election victories. You won't find it here, which should give us all pause:
Swamped in the Battlegrounds
In Pennsylvania, the biggest electoral prize on the battleground map, Mr. Trump’s victory received an outsize boost from an unlikely place — the five counties with the highest percentage of registered Democrats: Allegheny, Delaware, Lackawanna, Montgomery and Philadelphia.
Ms. Harris won these counties, but not by the margins needed to overcome Republican-heavy areas of the state. Total turnout was down from 2020 in all five Democratic strongholds, which could partly explain how Ms. Harris received 78,000 fewer votes than Mr. Biden. Mr. Trump added 24,000 votes to his total in these same counties.
This gap left Ms. Harris with little chance of winning Pennsylvania. Mr. Trump’s victory margin in the state, as of Sunday, was about 145,000 votes.
In Wisconsin, the voter participation rate overall was among the highest of any state. But voters in Democratic-heavy counties simply could not keep pace with gains from their Republican counterparts.
Why could Democrats not "keep pace"? They did not have a rural strategy to give them a chance.
