Follow the leader
You can spend all day listening to people on TV and Twitter offer their best educated guesses (and in some cases their most ludicrous attention-getting guesses) about which states are in play in a presidential election. But if you want the real answer, you take a look at where the candidates themselves are spending most of their time and resources.
Candidates and their campaigns and their political parties have access to the kind of detailed internal polling and demographic data that people like you, me, and the people on TV don’t get to see.
Of course this requires the candidate, campaign and party to be competent enough to know what they’re doing. Donald Trump and his people seem to be delusionally throwing darts when it comes to allocating resources. But Kamala Harris and her people are obviously very competent about all of this. And so we can learn a lot by watching where she’s investing her time.
Harris has recently focused a lot of time and resources on North Carolina and Georgia. She’s continuing that trend by having Tim Walz visit both states this upcoming week. Kamala herself will spend her time in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin this week, according to her campaign.
This tells you which states Kamala Harris thinks are the most firmly in play and thus the biggest priorities. It doesn’t necessarily mean other states, like Florida, aren’t in play. But it does mean that Kamala still thinks the election is on track to mainly come down to a specific handful of states.
If Kamala Harris’ time and resource allocation changes in the coming weeks, we’ll take that as a sign that she’s seeing a shift in the internal numbers and she’s prioritizing additional states. But for now, she’s telling us with her actions where we should prioritize our own efforts. She’s our leader, and she knows what she’s doing, so it’s our job to follow the leader – not listen to people on TV whose job is to try to prove how much smarter they supposedly are than our leader is.
