Top Democrats confident ‘blue wall’ in Midwest will save Biden

Top Democrats acknowledge that President Biden won’t win this year by the same Electoral College landslide he won by in 2020, conceding that winning in Arizona and Georgia will be tough given Biden’s low approval rating.

But Democrats are counting on what’s called the “blue wall” in the Midwest: Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, where Biden has seen an uptick in polling numbers and where his effort to rebuild domestic manufacturing is most likely to pay off. 

Democrats say their top issue — abortion rights — also resonates especially strongly in those three states, adding to what they see as Biden’s advantage there.

“It was critical in 2020, it was critical in ’16,” Senate Democratic Policy and Communications Committee Chair Debbie Stabenow (Mich.) said of the Democrats’ blue wall in the upper Midwest.  

Stabenow said Biden’s focus on “onshoring” or bringing back American manufacturing jobs will be a top selling point of his reelection campaign in her home state.

“The CEO of U.S. Steel has called in a manufacturing renaissance. We’re bringing jobs back. Basically, the Biden administration is doing everything that others including Donald Trump have talked about but were never really serious about doing,” she said.

“President Biden is aiming right at the middle class: Particularly, bringing jobs home. Rebuild America. You tackle costs, you take on the drug companies. Made in America,” she added.

That confidence comes despite recent public polls showing former President Trump with a slight lead in Michigan and the two candidates in a dead heat in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Democratic presidential candidates have carried Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in every election going back to 1992 with the glaring exception of 2016, when Trump won all three states by narrow margins — fewer than 80,000 voters across the three.

Trump’s success was attributed to his greater appeal to working class voters in those states compared to Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

Clinton’s campaign was also criticized for overlooking Michigan and Wisconsin, which were seen as relatively safe Democratic states until shortly before they slipped away.

Biden won all three, albeit by narrow margins, but Democrats think he will be the favored in those states heading into Election Day, given their past 30 years of voting history and the prominence of the abortion fight.

“Generally, the most reasonably way to predict future voting behavior is to look at past voting behavior. Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin are all states that, by and large, we’ve done pretty well in over the years — 2016 being the outlier there,” said Steve Schale, a Democratic strategist who served as a senior adviser to President Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign.

He noted there are Democratic governors in all three states and the party has better infrastructure there compared to Arizona and Georgia, for example.

“I’ve said that to my Democratic friends a lot about Arizona and Georgia. Obviously, Biden won those states, and I think there are a lot of reasons to feel good about those states moving into the next decade or two decades, but they’re not going to be blue states overnight,” he said.

Biden was the first Democrat to carry Georgia in a presidential election since Bill Clinton did so in 1992, and he was the first Democrat to carry Arizona since Clinton in 1996.

If Biden sweeps Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin again, he would be virtually assured of winning reelection — barring a major upset in another state.

Another key battleground is Nevada, which Democrats have carried in every recent presidential election except for 2004, when George W. Bush edged out then-Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.).

But even if Biden loses Nevada’s six electoral votes, he would still reach the 270 he needs to win, assuming Democrats manage to pick off the blue-leaning congressional district in Nebraska, which splits its electoral slate. Biden won the district that includes Omaha in 2020.

Biden’s appeal to blue-collar voters in the Midwest has always been one of his biggest selling points as a candidate — and even tempted some Democrats to push him to challenge Hillary Clinton ahead of the 2016 election.

And Biden has made helping the economies of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin a top priority since coming to the Oval Office.

The White House announced last year that companies have invested more than $4 billion in manufacturing across Wisconsin since the start of his presidency, thanks to his major domestic legislative achievements: the American Rescue Plan, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act.

And it announced in February that $10.1 billion from the infrastructure law is headed to Michigan to fund more than 548 projects.

The president extolled the impact of “Bidenomics” during a speech at the Philadelphia shipyard last year, emphasizing the creation of nearly half a million jobs in Pennsylvania since he took office.

Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) said Biden’s work “reshoring” manufacturing jobs by passing the CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022 will help him appeal to blue-collar and middle-class voters in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

“You couldn’t ask for a better narrative than what this administration and this president have done around reshoring manufacturing, and if they tell that story in those states, I think things will go very well,” he said.

Heinrich also cited the abortion issue as a major advantage in Democratic-leaning Midwestern states such as Michigan and Wisconsin.  

Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) cautioned “it’s going to be tight,” reflecting the widespread view among Senate Democrats that the presidential race will be closer this year than it was in 2020, when Biden won 306 electoral votes — 74 more than Trump won.

Biden traveled to Milwaukee and Saginaw, Mich., on March 13 and 14. And he and first lady Jill Biden visited Philadelphia March 8.

Welch said Biden is “doing what he has to do” by shifting to a “two-track message strategy” of “talking about the economy in ways that relate to people and everyday struggles” and “talking about Trump and what a lunatic he is.”

Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.) predicted that Biden will hang onto the must-win states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin because voters there are essentially pragmatic and focused on the economy, which remains strong despite widespread expert predictions of recession in 2023.

Biden’s reelection campaign got a shot of good news Friday when the Labor Department reported the economy added 303,000 jobs in March, beating expectations. It was the 39th straight month of job growth, and the unemployment rate fell to 3.8 percent, compared to 3.9 percent in February.  

“It’s too early to tell for sure but I think the economy continues the grow, and we’re seeing the MAGA side of the Republican Party clearly making politics, trying to block making things better at the border, solving some of those problems, for political advantage,” he said, citing conservative opposition to the bipartisan Senate border deal.

Republicans derailed the deal, even though it had the support of the National Border Patrol Council and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) had hailed it as a “huge success by any objective standard.”

“In states like Michigan … people want results, and they don’t like it” when politicians adopt a strategy of “we want to have an advantage in this election therefore we’re going to kill this bill,” Hickenlooper said. “That doesn’t sell.”