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For the top strategists from both parties, there’s one number that dominates their thinking every four years: 270. That, of course, is the baseline of votes in the Electoral College needed to win the White House, and there’s only so many paths that either Kamala Harris or Donald Trump could viably consider to get there.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]But for some quants, there’s another number that tells the story of how Joe Biden beat Trump in 2020: 1 million. That’s the rough gains in white men that Biden achieved in six key battleground states over Hillary Clinton’s performance four years earlier. A TIME analysis suggests that Biden was able to move those states out of Trump’s grasp in large part by narrowing Clinton’s margin of loss among white men. And Biden’s team, for all of its faults, was clear-eyed in 2020 that a nibble here and there could be the whole ballgame.
Biden ran 11 points ahead of Clinton with white men in Georgia. Arizona and Michigan saw a 10-point swing. Wisconsin and Nevada witnessed six-point pivots. In Pennsylvania, it was five. The effort in North Carolina was the lone failure, but it nevertheless saw a three-point improvement over 2016 levels.
Harris’ campaign knows they aren’t going to win white men as a whole against Trump. But they also consider it a priority to not backslide to Clinton-era support.
Need evidence? Look at Wednesday night’s DNC lineup. After two days in which headliners included Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, and Hillary Clinton, the big names on Wednesday include Harris running mate Tim Walz, former President Bill Clinton, and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg—three potential safety blankets for any white man feeling ambivalent about a party whose convention is featuring women and people of color more prominently and consistently than they were at the Republican convention last month.
In the seven states now universally considered the biggest prizes, white men make up roughly one-third of the electorate. But here’s the detail that matters: Clinton won just about 30% of them, while Biden claimed 37% of them. In fact, the Biden coalition was 26% white men, three points better than Clinton. Yes, the party actually whitened and turned more male.
In the weeks after Biden’s disastrous debate showing, his apologists in shouted whispers kept returning to Biden’s appeal to these white men. They argued Harris, the obvious replacement who happens to be Black and Asian-American, might not have as much success with the demographic and could end up even behind Clinton’s showing. Establishment Democrats were unconvinced and actively suggested that Harris stood to boost support among multiple key demographics in those pivotal swing states where Biden was weak. They kept the pressure on Biden, who begrudgingly accepted his critics’ assessment even if, to this day, he disagrees with it.
With Harris at the top of the ticket, Democrats rightly saw their path to holding the White House widen beyond the so-called Blue Wall states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. To be frank: the Blue Wall is under the management of white men. But Harris’ polling suggests a path to 270 that could instead stretch through Sun Belt states like Nevada, Arizona, and Georgia. Heck, they might even cobble together the 2020 map and shade North Carolina blue for the first time since 2008. Although it remains a longshot, Democratic donors are suddenly thinking Florida could be a fun play to force Donald Trump to spend cash in his backyard as the Senate race remains a stealth—and rare—pick-up chance. For as much as white men may have a numerical dominance, the party similarly cannot afford to write off its loyal spine of Black voters, suburban women, and college grads.
But look at the programming as the Democrats meet in Chicago this week, and Wednesday night in particular, and it’s entirely obvious no one is rushing to put a Blue Wall route on ice. No, in fact, the agenda on stage at their convention suggests Democrats still see the northern pass as the easiest way to block Trump from returning to power. But for that to happen, Democrats have to convince a Bidenesque coalition to hold, and—what no one is really eager to say—that means getting the country’s second largest voting bloc to move past any latent skepticism of the first woman of color to be either major party’s nominee.
Thus, Wednesday’s lineup is plenty heavy with white men at the podium.
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