Kamala Harris Is Worried About Michigan

The so-called “blue wall” of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania has moved together in every presidential election since 1988, which was the last time a Republican won Pennsylvania. While that swing state has been the main focus of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris as the one worth the most electoral votes, the Harris campaign may be pivoting to its west, as the central plank of the blue wall is looking shaky and the Harris campaign is concerned, per a new report from NBC.

“There has been a thought that maybe Michigan or Wisconsin will fall off,” said a senior Harris campaign official, who stressed that the bigger concern is over Michigan. Two other people with knowledge of campaign strategy — who, like others in this article, were granted anonymity to speak candidly — also underscored deep concern about Michigan. Those people still believe that all the states are close and that there are alternative routes to victory.

According to Votehub.us’s current 28 day average of highly-rated polls, Wisconsin is actually the safest of the blue wall states, as Harris is up one percent, versus 0.4 percent in Pennsylvania and just 0.1 percent in Michigan, the latter of which has the largest Arab American population of any state. Michigan is also the origin of the Uncommitted Movement, which won 101,000 votes in the Democratic primary to try to force Biden to end his unequivocal support for Israel’s genocide of Gaza in order to earn their vote.

Because American political analysis will always be part voodoo until we know the outcome, why Michigan has moved so hard away from Harris as of late is unknowable for now. We can use exit polling and other sampling methods to help understand what happened after the election, but until then it’s a guess at best as to the primary driver behind Michigan’s slippage in the polls.

But there is a pretty good guess that is very obvious, and if they do lose Michigan, there is no question that it at least had a hand in the outcome. Israel’s genocide of Gaza has accelerated in recent weeks, and polls in Michigan have tightened over the same time period while Kamala Harris maintains that she would do very little differently than Joe Biden.

Both President Biden and Vice President Harris have read from a carefully curated list of narrow talking points every time Israel’s genocide has come up while working tirelessly to redefine the term ceasefire, and it should come as no surprise if people are not buying the tepid and incoherent vision they are meekly selling as people in Palestine and Lebanon continue to be slaughtered by American bombs sent to Israel by the Biden-Harris administration. If Biden failing to rise to the level of past Republican presidents in even attempting to rein in Israel costs Kamala Harris Michigan, don’t blame the voters, blame the powerful people in the Democratic Party whose murderous actions helped upend a reliable 36-year trend in politics.