Behind the Blue Wall: Trump’s Giveaways, Harris’ Balancing Act

NOVI, Michigan — After the most turbulent modern American presidential election, the race now rests on competing and straightforward bets in the three states that have determined three consecutive White House campaigns.

Vice President Kamala Harris' hope is that her anti-Trump alliance is so broad and deeply motivated it can overcome gale-force external political conditions while former President Donald Trump's wager is that the precariousness of her coalition at a worldwide moment of anti-incumbent anger will be her undoing.

Following a summer of upheaval — a harrowing assassination attempt on one nominee shortly before the other was purged in a parliamentary coup — the 2024 campaign appears destined to conclude in an altogether predictable place: decided by fewer than 100,000 voters across Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

Trump has haphazardly sought to capitalize on over-unhappiness with the status quo. He'll dutifully read scripted remarks borrowing Ronald Reagan's line about if voters are better off now than four years ago. And he'll play Ed McMahon-with-oversized-check, offering all manner of alluring giveaways from subsidized IVF treatments to tax-free tips, overtime and Social Security, sweepstakes politics with about as much a chance of happening as McMahon showing up at your door.

Yet, Trump being Trump, he's most effective at playing the role of troll as he attempts to upend Harris' coalition. And, also Trump being Trump, he'll read the stage directions while he's at it.

Look no further than this suburban Detroit community, where last weekend Trump met and took photos with a group of Muslim imams before having them on stage, many in clerical regalia. The move immediately rocketed through Michigan's Arab community, with prominent figures therein asking top Democrats in the state why Harris doesn't stand so proudly with Muslims, I'm told by well-placed Michigan lawmakers.

Never mind that at the moment Trump brought out the imams, some of his supporters outside the rally were telling me they hoped he'd "get rid of immigrants."

And never mind that Trump called for a Muslim ban in his initial White House bid. That was then. Now he wants to siphon enough Arab votes to block Harris' path in Michigan, a state she almost certainly needs to forge 270 electoral votes.

Sometimes, Trump will voice the strategy outright. Landing in New Mexico this week, a state few in either party see as at risk of turning red, the former president explained: "I'm here for one very simple reason: I like you very much, and it's good for my credentials with the Hispanic or Latino community."

Yet the most memorable Trump effort at driving a wedge through Harris' alliance was nothing he said. It was the ad his campaign ran featuring clips of Charlamagne tha God's Black-oriented radio show discussing Harris' support for a California law subsidizing sex change operations for prisoners. "Hell no, I don't want my taxpayer dollars going to that," Charlamagne says in the spot, which has penetrated deeply enough in the African American community that I'm told focus groups of Black men have repeated parts of it verbatim.

The gift of the Trump era for Democrats is that his uniquely divisive style has handed them an ungainly but majority coalition, helping them claim the presidency, governorships and congressional majorities. The burden of the Trump era for Democrats is trying to hold together voters who have little in common except unease with the former president. And sustaining that alliance has grown harder with control of the presidency, which means making choices and inevitably angering parts of the Trump skeptical coalition.

You can see this as Harris willing, for example, to campaign with Liz Cheney but unwilling to go further in practicing the politics of reassurance by actually vowing to govern from the center for fear it would depress progressives.

Add to that decades-high inflation, a deeply unpopular incumbent who insisted on running until the summer before his reelection and the same post-Covid malaise which has soured voters across the world and it's easy to see why Trump could win. That's to say nothing of the appeal of a strongman's demagoguery, particularly when it comes to scapegoating migrants, an old tactic normalized at this late date by a party willing to avert its gaze from naked race-baiting.

And unless Harris can pick up a pair of states in the Sun Belt, Trump simply has the easier path to 270 electoral votes: all he has to do is prevail in one of the three Great Lakes states.

Yet for all this, Trump very well could lose Tuesday, or at least when all the ballots are finally tallied. And if he does, it will largely be at his own hand.

I say largely because Harris and her top aides, led by Jen O'Malley Dillon, have orchestrated a strong campaign, under the most difficult of circumstances. In just over three months, they organized a compelling convention, superb debate, performance and battled to a neck and neck race.

Still, for all of their challenges, Democrats' best asset remains what it has been since the first special elections of 2017, when the party harnessed a Lululemon-and-loafers suburban backlash. To borrow a phrase, the show is Trump and it ... has handed Democrats wins most everywhere for nearly a decade.

Let's be blunt: the only reason why Democrats are in contention this year is because Republicans nominated a candidate who's singularly alienating and whose Supreme Court justices ended legal abortion.

There's what he says. Vowing punishment on his critics, insisting he'll protect women "whether they like it or not" and insisting the riot that culminated after he refused to accept defeat in 2020 was "a day of love." It goes on and on.

The constant stream of inflammatory rhetoric that would have torpedoed a nominee of either party in an earlier era — and which he forces his apologists to defend as merely "mean tweets" — renders him a nonstarter for millions of voters.

Then there's the criminal charges against him, the accusations of sexual misconduct and a history of infidelity that, along with the overturning of , has created the conditions for a potentially historic turnout among women that could sink him.

Walking out of a Philadelphia rally for Harris, Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon (D-Pa.) told me she thought the vice president could win with an even larger margin than President Biden in places like her suburban district, in part because of female voters.

"We knock a lot of doors and we especially see it around the gender gap, cause you go to a door and the husband is like, 'There's no Democrats here' and the daughter or the wife in the background is going, ehhhhh!" Scanlon said, waving her hand to mimic the women of the house they encountered.

For all of Trump's sins of political commission, there's also the omissions.

He can't bring himself to ask his top rival in the primary, Nikki Haley, for help because he doesn't want to bend the knee to somebody who's criticized him. So when he shows up in suburban Philadelphia for a question-and-answer session, it's not with the candidate who won a quarter of the vote there even as a zombie candidate in the primary. It's with South Dakota Gov Kristi Noem, who's not exactly Bryn Mawr's kind of Republican.

Trump would seemingly rather lose with thirsty supplicants like former Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — who do nothing to win over Haley voters — than win by making one phone call to the person he made his ambassador to the United Nations.

Of course, it's the great irony of this race that Kennedy's lingering presence on the ballot in key battlegrounds like Michigan and Wisconsin may drain enough votes from Trump to hand Harris those states. It's one of the few things both campaigns privately agree on: The most unlikely surrogate of them all for Trump may still do more to doom him than help him.

The question — said former Rep. Charlie Dent, a Republican who's supporting Harris — is if she can "run up the score in the suburbs of Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Allentown and Harrisburg to offset Trump's gains in rural areas and smaller cities."

Biden carried the four suburban Philadelphia counties in 2020 by a total of 19 points. Can Harris increase the raw vote from those counties and the total margin there? She may have to, particularly if turnout in Philadelphia declines.

Sitting in the Robert A. Brady Philadelphia Democratic Party headquarters, Robert A. Brady, the former congressman and seemingly forever city boss, grappled with the weight of it all this week.

"I'm breaking balls to find more money," Brady told me, volunteering that he may have to "take a fucking mortgage out, I can't let this fucking guy become president."

Next to Brady sat his young lieutenant and numbers-cruncher, Gianni Hill, with laptop open.

The margin Harris needed coming out of Philadelphia to win statewide was straightforward, Hill said.

"If we are looking at 450 [thousand], it's going to be tight, that's not going to be an early night, if we're looking at 480 [thousand] I'm feeling good, if it's above 500 [thousand] they're calling p-a."