Ronald Brownstein writes:

Big margins in the biggest places represent Kamala Harris’s best chance of overcoming Donald Trump’s persistent strength in the decisive swing states. Across those battlegrounds, Harris’s campaign is banking on strong showings both in major urban centers with large minority populations and in the white-collar inner suburbs growing around the cities. Despite widespread dissatisfaction with the economy under President Joe Biden, those are the places where she can find the highest concentrations of voters likely to reject Trump anyway, because they view him as a threat to their rights, their values, and the rule of law.

Posting significant advantages in these large metropolitan areas represents Harris’s best—if not only—opportunity to squeeze past Trump in the most closely contested swing states, particularly the Rust Belt battlegrounds of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin that remain her most likely path to an Electoral College majority.

When Harris visited Michigan last weekend, her itinerary underscored this priority. On Friday night, she appeared before a sizable, enthusiastic audience in Oakland County, a well-educated and prosperous Detroit suburb that has shifted dramatically from red to blue over the past three decades. Then, on Saturday morning, Harris held an event with the singer Lizzo in downtown Detroit on the first day that city residents were eligible to vote early. Yesterday, Harris returned to Oakland County to campaign with former Republican Representative Liz Cheney as part of a day-long sweep by the two women through white-collar suburbs outside Philadelphia and Milwaukee as well.

“That pairing and that geography tells you we think we have a lot of room to run up the score” in those places, Lauren Hitt, a spokesperson for the Harris campaign, told me. Over the weekend, the campaign released strategy memos that cited expanded margins in well-educated suburban communities as the key to Harris’s ability to hold Michigan and Pennsylvania next month. The campaign hasn’t released similar blueprints for the other battleground states, but its formula for victory in all of them looks the same. [Continue reading…]