Kamala Harris and her soon-to-be-named VP candidate choice will be making some moves, and in the very near future. It looks now like the first such moves will be a tour of the battleground states in an effort to shore up her support in these must-win jurisdictions.
Harris will announce her vice presidential pick before next week’s tour of states that could swing to Republicans or Democrats in November, one of the sources said.The short list of candidates under consideration include Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, U.S. Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg.On Monday, North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper and Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer both indicated they were both out of the VP sweepstakes.A handful of U.S. states, often called battlegrounds, have decided the presidential election in recent years, including Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
According to the RealClearPolitics polling apparatus, the battleground states include not only Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin but also Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina, and Georgia. Former President Donald Trump is leading in all of these states as of this writing:
- Arizona: Trump +4.4
- Nevada: Trump +5.8
- Wisconsin: Trump +3.3
- Michigan: Trump +2.1
- Pennsylvania: Trump +4.5
- North Carolina: Trump +5.7
- Georgia: Trump +4.0
Setting this into a “no toss-ups” Electoral College map yields a 312-226 win for the Trump/Vance ticket. Mind you it’s still over three months until the election, and a lot can happen in that time.
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This proposed tour, though, brings up some questions.
First: What sort of appearances with the Harris campaign allow for their candidate? Given her history of avoiding actually answering direct questions and instead spewing out incomprehensible word salads, we can suspect that the campaign will try to restrict her to carefully scripted events with questions screened and chosen in advance. Her campaign apparatus and the apparatchiks that work in it are, we suspect, largely inherited from the Biden campaign and so are practiced in shielding their boss from any real challenge. They did it for Joe Biden because he’s senile; they will do it for Kamala Harris because she’s incompetent.
Second: Take a look at those states, the states that will almost certainly decide this election. Two of them – Michigan and Pennsylvania – are Rust Belt states, where Democrats are heavily leavened by traditional white, blue-collar voters, who may not be enamored by Kamala Harris’ far-left positions – and who may find Trump’s America-first stances appealing. Trump’s lead in Michigan is within the margin of error, but he’s maintaining a larger lead in Pennsylvania.
This battleground tour is, granted, a must-do for the Harris/? campaign. These are the places where the election will be decided. These are the places that they must win. Several of these states are the places where they will have trouble since their presidential candidate is to the left of Bernie Sanders, and being out there to the left past the daffy old Bolshevik from Vermont isn’t a good recipe for winning over those jurisdictions.
It will be interesting to watch. Eventually, Kamala Harris will be required to stand on her own and answer questions directly, and this will likely happen during a debate, where she will be facing Donald Trump on the stage. An outpouring of her usual word salads won’t help her there.
97 days to go!
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