How Sturdy Is the Democrats’ ‘Blue Wall’ in 2024?
Key factors to watch for in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.
BACK IN 2015, IT WAS REASONABLE to believe that folks in the Midwestern United States wouldn’t be drawn to Donald Trump. Midwestern voters favor real punches over mindless talk, solidity over frivolity—and here comes a haughty rich guy from New York who literally started his campaign riding down a golden escalator. What could a suburban voter from the part of the country where folks make big metal things for businesses that make littler metal things see in a guy as pretentious as Donald Trump?
But Trump knew his crowd. He ran against immigration, he ran against free trade, and he ran against the insiders—like his opponent, Hillary Clinton—who supported immigration and free trade.
And the Rust Belt bought into that. The number of Midwestern manufacturing jobs had dropped by more than 25 percent since the late 1990s—that’s 1.5 million jobs gone. The effects of the financial crisis and the home foreclosure mess were still being felt, with many Midwesterners having to rebuild their retirement savings. And there was a large, aging suburban population that thought no one cared about them and believed inner-city residents were getting too many handouts.
The older white males in these Midwestern suburbs were low-hanging fruit for Trump. Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin—four of the states that for two decades had been part of the Democrats’ “Blue Wall”—flipped red. The combined margin of victory was just 75,000 votes. Without those four states he would have lost the Electoral College 240 to 291; with them, he won 304 to 227.
Four years later, Joe Biden took back three of those states (Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin) for the Democrats by a combined margin of about 250,000 votes. If those three states had stayed red, Trump would have won the Electoral College by 278 to 260; instead, Trump lost 232 to 306.
The same holds true in 2024: If either Biden or Trump wins all three of those states—Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin1—he will almost certainly win the White House. So how do things stand in those three Blue Wall states today?
Between now and November, you’ll hear endless speculation about those states. The pollsters and psephologists and prognosticators will run their projections and declare these states too close to call. Count on hearing many, many interviews with Midwestern voters on the fence.
I want to offer a different way of thinking about what is going on in these states. When you get on the ground and talk with real Midwestern voters, you find some common sense in their thinking. It’s not that these voters have made a big switch in one direction or another, or that they have especially strong feelings about Trump’s continuing lies about the 2020 election, or that they care about his obsession with sharks, birds and windmills, and bathroom-water issues.
What Midwestern voters really care about is that Trump has nothing new to offer.
Trump is not turning the page to get the undecideds—or, for that matter, to keep some of his less than enthusiastic base. Hang with the sitting-on-lawn-chairs-in-the-driveway-drinking-beer crowd and you’ll hear that message over and over. “You can’t be against everything and win again and again,” said one suburban Cleveland retail business owner in his mid-fifties who voted for Trump in 2016 but not in 2020. “He’s got to offer how things will be better if we vote for him. It’s like any product the public buys. Cars, fast food, new windows for your house. You’ll buy if you have reasons to buy in. He’s not doing that.”
THREE REASONS Trump can expect trouble in these Midwestern states: the age factor, the spending factor, and the women factor.
1. The Age Factor (But Not the One You’re Thinking of)
No, I don’t mean the age of the candidates—I mean the age of the voters. Voters 65 and older are favoring Biden over Trump by double digits in some recent polls. The over-65 crowd has always voted in much higher numbers than younger people; getting them can spell victory.
And the Blue Wall states have lots of these older voters. In the United States in general, 30.3 percent of the population is age 55 and older. But in Pennsylvania, the figure is 33.6 percent. Michigan and Wisconsin are at 32.5 and 32.8 percent.
While in general, urban populations skew younger than rural populations, in these Blue Wall states’ biggest metro areas—Philadelphia, Detroit, and Milwaukee—the populations are all at or slightly older than the national average, and if you win those cities you win those states.
2. The Spending Factor
The public doesn’t appreciate this, because it is underreported and less sexy than other topics in campaign politics, but the end of June is a key moment for any presidential campaign. It marks the end of the second fiscal quarter, and many economic reports start filtering out in July and August, and so campaigns start adjusting their ad buys and messaging. Any polling before these changes are made can’t be trusted to represent the election results very well.
Case in point: Trump knows that the public has an insatiable appetite for crime numbers and inflation costs, so he is constantly talking about how people are unsafe walking down the street or how the cost of gasoline is rising to unheard levels. As the campaign season turns a corner, the Biden campaign can start spending more money to show that things are not as Trump describes them.
Expect this corrective messaging to show up as soon as this Thursday’s debate. If Trump starts to make his usual fact-free assertions about crime and the economy, Biden can turn them against him.
3. The Women Factor
There has been lots of press coverage about how Biden is losing women to Trump. But the picture is more complicated than that.
For example, a recent Kaiser Family Foundation survey found that 60 percent of black Michigan women voters say they worry “a lot” about affording food and groceries, along with housing costs and utilities. Yet most also agree that “the Democratic Party does a better job than the Republican Party of addressing the cost of household expenses.”
Or take this April New York Times/Siena College poll. Buried in the middle was an important question that went unreported: “How much do you think Donald Trump respects women?” Nearly a quarter of the women respondents (24 percent) said “not much”—and a staggering 44 percent said “not at all.” Taken together that is 68 percent of half the U.S. population indicating a presidential candidate doesn’t like them. This was not a survey group trending younger (about 57 percent of the women surveyed were over 45), nor very liberal (35 percent said they were “moderate,” 19 percent “somewhat conservative,” 13 percent “very conservative”). About 20 percent of the overall respondents were from the Midwest.
That women voters across the country believe by a huge margin that one of the two candidates doesn’t respect them is likely to be one of the defining factors of this election—not least because women voters vastly outnumbered men voters in Michigan and Pennsylvania in November 2020.
And none of that even gets into the ‘women’s issues’ that could shape the 2024 campaign, like abortion, which was a defining factor in the 2022 midterms and could easily become a major issue again this year.
SO IF YOU WANT TO UNDERSTAND how the Blue Wall will hold up this cycle, keep an eye on the older voters, monitor how the campaigns spend their money on messaging in the weeks ahead, and watch where the women voters are coming down.
And remember that, as that Ohio business owner told me, having a message that you’re “against everything” isn’t enough. Donald Trump can’t keep playing his how-downtrodden-the-suburbs-are message. He’ll have to come up with something new. He just doesn’t seem capable of doing that right now.
We can set aside Ohio, which Trump will win.
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