Kamala Harris works to fortify the ‘blue wall’ as Democrats fret over a 2016 repeat

Kamala Harris and Democrats are feverishly working to fortify the “blue wall” states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, still haunted by Donald Trump’s victories there eight years ago that delivered him the White House and could send him back if he prevails again.

Few battlegrounds carry as much collective symbolism as the trio of Great Lakes states, where the vice president is locked in a bitterly close duel with the former president. Three competitive Senate races are playing out across the same terrain, with Democrats fighting to protect seats critical to their endangered majority.

The November election will test whether the three states will march in lockstep – as they have all but twice over the past half-century – or whether they will choose different candidates, potentially complicating the winning path to 270 electoral votes for Harris or Trump.

The blue wall states offer a window into the urgency facing Democrats in the final three weeks of the campaign as a wave of fresh anxiety settles in across the party amid concerns over whether Harris is effectively winning her relentless argument against Trump’s fitness for office.

“You know what? I would always want my side to be anxious,” Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer told CNN during a weeklong blue wall bus tour she’s leading across the three states. “It means we’re taking it seriously. It means we understand how high the stakes are.”

Brian Schimming, chairman of the Wisconsin Republican Party, said the closing chapter of the race “feels like 2016,” when Trump narrowly carried his state and the GOP delivered a strong performance down the ballot. The former president visited Wisconsin four times in eight days earlier this month and is poised to return next week.

“In three weeks, I’ll be calling it the red wall,” Schimming told CNN. “I understand the fact that it’s a very, very competitive state. There’s no doubt about that. But they are in trouble, and that blue wall is not built right now for them.”

Harris is seeking to shore up all corners of the broad Democratic coalition – day by day – as she devotes nearly all week campaigning in the three states, shuttling from Pennsylvania to Michigan and back, before flying to Wisconsin for three stops on Thursday.

“Our campaign is not a fight against something. It is a fight for something,” Harris said Wednesday in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, flanked by prominent Republicans who have endorsed her candidacy. “It is a fight for the fundamental principles upon which we were founded. It is a fight for a new generation of leadership that is optimistic about what we can achieve together.”

Her campaign is intensifying its focus on persuading moderate Republicans and independent voters who are opposed to Trump to set other differences aside and support her – following the lead of former Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, who recently campaigned alongside Harris in Wisconsin. At the same time, she is working to improve her standing with Black men who are a core of the party’s base.

“It’s both persuading and mobilizing at the same time – really until the end,” said Dan Kanninen, battleground director for the Harris campaign. “I still see room for us to grow. I don’t think we’ve hit our ceiling in the suburbs. There are Republican women, there are independent men, who are moving away, still, from Donald Trump.”

Harris campaign officials see parallels among suburban voters from Bucks County to Oakland County, Michigan, to Waukesha County, Wisconsin. But even as they seek to build upon their margins with college-educated voters, they are also working to make marginal gains among working-class voters.

“The more incendiary the rhetoric gets from Donald Trump and the more extreme the positions get,” Kanninen said, “the more we see an opportunity to build and expand on that suburban vote.”

Back when President Joe Biden was in the race, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania were seen as his only viable path to winning 270 electoral votes.

While Harris is less reliant on carrying all three states, it still remains her strongest path to the presidency. A wider path across the Sun Belt battlegrounds of Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina has done little to ease anxieties among Democrats that she is struggling to close the sale against Trump.

The Democratic governors of the three blue wall states – Whitmer, Tony Evers of Wisconsin and Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania – kicked off a bus tour this week across their states to drum up support for the Democratic ticket.

“We’re going to need every single freaking vote we can get,” Evers said during a stop in Hudson, Wisconsin, bluntly reminding Democrats of the hard work over the next three weeks.

As Whitmer and Evers traveled across Wisconsin, they fired up party activists and implored Democrats to work harder than they ever have in an election season.

“Stop wringing your hands and roll up your sleeves,” Whitmer said. “Elections are decided by what happens on the ground. A handful of conversations we have could very well contribute to whatever the outcome is, so make good use of these 21 days.”

Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania tend to break one way in presidential elections. Only twice in the past 50 years have they not chosen the same candidate.

The exceptions were 1988, when Michael Dukakis carried Wisconsin, while George H.W. Bush won Michigan and Pennsylvania, and 1976, when Gerald Ford won his home state of Michigan as Jimmy Carter took Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

“It’s been a little bit of happenstance that they’ve ended up on the same side. The states are not demographically identical,” said Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “When the elections are this close, it’s possible they could split.”

There are already some signs that the states might deliver a split decision in 2024 – in part due to demographic differences and how the candidates are tailoring their messages.

In Pennsylvania, Harris lacks a key element of Biden’s appeal: The Catholic, working-class son of Scranton had local and cultural ties to the state.

Biden hit the campaign trail Tuesday, speaking at Philadelphia Democrats’ fall dinner, where he attempted to pass his support in the state on to Harris but also seemed to give her room to break from the Biden administration on some policy matters. He said Harris has “been loyal so far, but she’s going to cut her own path.”

“Every president has to cut their own path. That’s what I did,” Biden said. “I was loyal to Barack Obama, but I cut my own path as president. That’s what Kamala is going to do.”

In Michigan, Democrats for months have faced two major warning signs: An erosion of Arab American support, much of it concentrated in Dearborn, over the US role in Israel’s war in Gaza, and slippage among union members – a reality laid bare when both the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and the International Association of Fire Fighters declined to endorse a presidential candidate.

Trump has tailored his economic pitch for Michigan’s auto workers, pledging tariffs on imported vehicles that he claims would rejuvenate the industry in and around Detroit.

The former president’s campaign has courted young, non-White men. But he risked undercutting those appeals last week in Detroit, when he compared the city to a developing nation and said that the “whole country will end up being like Detroit” if Harris wins.

Trump’s effort to appeal to non-White men is part of a broader trend: While polls show Harris has built on the huge gains Democrats have made with women during the decade that Trump has dominated Republican politics, the former president could match those gains among men.

At a campaign stop Monday night in Green Bay, Wisconsin, Harris’ running mate, Tim Walz, made clear that the pair were trying to improve their standing among men in an election that polls suggest could have a potentially historic gender gap.

“The message is sinking in with the women, fellas, so I’m going to make a message to the guys here for just a minute,” said Walz, the Minnesota governor. “You got any women you love in your life, your wives, your daughters, your mothers and friends? Let’s not forget, their lives are literally at stake in this election.”

Harris’ media appearances have also been aimed at curbing Trump’s gains with men – including recent sit-downs with Howard Stern, “The Breakfast Club” co-host Charlamagne Tha God and more.

One window into the importance both the Harris and Trump campaigns are placing on Pennsylvania and its 19 electoral college votes is advertising, with nearly one-fifth of all ad spending in the 2024 race targeting the Keystone State.

The sides have combined to pour almost $69 million into television ads there in the first half of October, according to AdImpact data. That spending is split nearly evenly between Democrats and Republicans.

Another $100 million is booked on Pennsylvania’s airwaves through the end of the campaign.

It’s trailed by Michigan, with about $42 million spent through the first half of October and Democrats outspending the GOP there by nearly $7 million. Another $65 million is reserved there through the race’s end.

The next-largest spending figures are seen in Georgia, North Carolina and Arizona, followed by Wisconsin at $28 million, split nearly evenly, and $32.3 million to come, with Democrats responsible for about 60% of that spending.

Republicans have focused one-third of their advertising in the first two weeks of October on the theme of transgender health care policies – a tactical shift from August and September, when the issue rarely appeared in their ads.

Since the beginning of October, Republican advertisers in the presidential race have flooded battleground airwaves with a series of stark attack ads, blasting Harris for supporting taxpayer-funded gender transition surgeries for detained immigrants and federal prisoners, a position she took during her unsuccessful 2020 presidential campaign.

“Kamala is for they/them,” a Trump campaign ad declares. “President Trump is for you.”

Harris and her allies, meanwhile, are devoting about half of their advertising to tax issues – including the vice president’s proposals aimed at middle-class families and attacking Trump’s approach as supporting tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy.

Abortion and reproductive rights, although still a focal point of Democratic advertising, have made up a smaller share of Harris and her allies’ October efforts.

To see how third-party challengers can make a difference in a presidential race, look no further than Wisconsin.

In 2020, Biden won the state by fewer than 21,000 votes, with no Green Party candidate on the ballot. Four years earlier, Trump won by nearly 23,000 votes, with Jill Stein of the Green Party earning more than 30,000 votes.

In August, Wisconsin election officials voted to keep Stein and independent contenders Cornel West and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on the November ballot, even though Kennedy had requested his name be removed after ending his candidacy and endorsing Trump.

Nationally, Stein is on the ballot in 38 states, including Michigan and Pennsylvania.

The Democratic National Committee is targeting Stein in a new Wisconsin ad, with an image of her face morphing into Trump.

“Why are Trump’s close allies helping her? Stein was key to Trump’s 2016 wins in battleground states,” the narrator says. “She’s not sorry she helped Trump win. That’s why a vote for Stein is really a vote for Trump.”

While Democrats are concerned enough about Stein’s candidacy to run a TV ad comparing her to Trump, party strategists believe support for the Libertarian Party candidate and Kennedy could also take votes away from Trump.

Christine Fink, a retired hospice nurse from Eau Claire, said she was anxious about the outcome of the race. She believes Harris is taking Wisconsin seriously and is confident in her ability, but Fink is also making a backup plan if Trump returns to the White House.

“It scares me quite a bit,” she said. “I’ve applied for dual citizenship in Ireland if it happens. I’m thinking about moving if he gets back in.”

Phil Swanhorst, a retired city bus driver in Eau Claire who now leads the county’s Democratic Party, said he was nervous about the result in November. But he said it was clear to him that the Harris campaign has learned lessons from 2016.

“Trump was here several times in that election, and Hillary (Clinton) never came to Wisconsin,” Swanhorst said. Asked whether Harris has been more visible, his voice came alive: “Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. The second day Tim Walz was named, they were both here in Eau Claire County.”

CNN’s David Wright contributed to this report.