Trump-Biden Battleground States Shaped by Virus-Fueled Downturn

The 12 closely contested states that will decide the U.S. election enjoyed healthy economies as the year began, boding well for President Donald Trump’s bid for a second term.

Now, after the coronavirus pandemic and ensuing economic collapse, the president’s fortunes in those battlegrounds has shifted radically, with job losses and business closings hitting each state differently. That could move the advantage toward Trump’s challenger, Democratic nominee Joe Biden, in some of the key states, including Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina.

Yet in others, the political balance may remain in Trump’s favor. Cities in Minnesota and Wisconsin—battleground states with Black populations about half the national average—were home to two of the summer’s most shocking incidents of police brutality, fueling occasionally violent protests that play to the president’s law-and-order theme and have disquieted the states’ rural populations.

Trump comes out of the Labor Day weekend and into the fall campaign season further behind in the polls than he was at the same point in 2016, and with unprecedented headwinds of a coronavirus-fueled recession and widespread dissatisfaction of his handling of race relations.

That’s not where he planned to be in September 2020.

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Biden now leads Trump by 7 percentage points in the RealClearPolitics average of national polls. That’s down from a 10-point lead in late June.

The parties’ conventions, which usually provide a bounce going into Labor Day, left voters largely unmoved after watching two weeks of speeches delivered to empty auditoriums—except for Trump’s controversial acceptance speech on the South Lawn of the White House, which did little to expand his base.

But the national polls matter less than what is happening in these 12 select states—whether they be called battlegrounds or swing states—that will get the lion’s share of candidates’ attention this fall.

Campaign Contributions by State

• Trump campaign
• Biden campaign

Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in 2016 but lost to Trump because of the Electoral College, which gives disproportionate influence to rural middle-of-the-country states so the coastal behemoths of California, Texas, Florida and New York don’t decide the election alone.

But the exact lineup of decisive states changes every four years as demographics evolve and the political parties realign to adjust and exploit changing attitudes.

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Long-simmering resentments over trade agreements and loss of jobs still carry political weight in Great Lakes states that rely on manufacturing—places that decided the 2016 election for Trump—while Georgia, one of the new battlegrounds emerging in 2020, has diversified its economy to take advantage of globalization.

States like Arizona and Georgia are traditionally Republican, but they are far more competitive in 2020 than they were in 2016, as new populations move into the states and they become less rural and less White. They join the rapidly urbanizing North Carolina, which Barack Obama won in 2008, as newly emerging battleground states.

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Trump’s deficits in Michigan and Pennsylvania—the so-called “Blue Wall” he demolished in 2016—have narrowed since Memorial Day, while widening in Wisconsin. He can win re-election by winning just one of them, but only if he also keeps other key states that could yet slip away.

Biden still holds leads in Florida and Arizona, and Trump’s advantage in Georgia is precariously thin. They’re neck-and-neck in North Carolina.

The turmoil over the drop in economic strength and the rise in virus cases has pushed even a state like Texas—which hasn’t voted for a Democrat for president in four decades—into contention for Biden, though still likely a reach.

Even smaller states like Iowa and New Hampshire, with just six and four electoral votes respectively, can reprise the kingmaker roles they enjoy in the primary season if the election is close enough.

Former bellwethers like Colorado, Nevada and Virginia have lost their battleground cache as they’ve begun to vote more Democratic, but the Trump campaign has suggested they see opportunities to compete in Nevada in 2020.

Perennial bellwethers like Ohio and Florida have voted for the winner in every election for decades.

But the coronavirus pandemic, which crashed the healthy economy Trump counted on, cost millions of people their jobs and so far has killed more than 189,000 people in the U.S., has created even more uncertainty about the deciding states because of the staggered efforts to recover.

Unemployment Rate by State

From January to July 2020

Several battleground states, including Michigan and Pennsylvania, have been hit particularly hard by the virus.

Michigan, the birthplace of the U.S. automotive industry, saw its unemployment rate soar to 24% in April as U.S. factory production shrank by the most on record, while Ohio’s jobless rate surged to 17.6%.

Months later, jobless rates still vary greatly—from 6.6% in Iowa to more than double that in Pennsylvania.

Florida, heavily reliant on tourism, saw 1.2 million jobs evaporate in just two months as Texas, hammered both by the virus and a collapse in oil prices, saw a similar loss. Meanwhile, Minnesota’s unemployment rate peaked at 9.9%—still high, but far shy of the degree of joblessness seen in other swing states.

The virus rages on, with each state seeing its own ebbs and flows. New Covid-19 cases peaked in New Hampshire in May but surged in Florida in July. Iowa saw the novel coronavirus rip through meatpacking plants in the early months of the pandemic, and in the last two weeks cases have surged.

Widespread business closures and stay-at-home orders put a lid on consumer spending, which plummeted in March and April. But some states have seen spending rebound faster than others, with total consumer spending in Texas and Pennsylvania surpassing January levels as of late August, according to the Opportunity Insights Economic Tracker.

Change in Consumer Spending Compared to January 2020

Battleground states have been molded by longer-term forces, too. Georgia has a large and growing Black middle class. In Texas and Arizona, about a quarter of the electorate is Hispanic, but Asian-American voters outnumber Hispanics in Michigan and Minnesota, according to the Census Bureau. Texas has seen migration from high cost-of-living states like California and New York, meaning new Democrats have joined its electorate.

That varied economic and demographic picture means no one campaign message will resonate everywhere. In the Great Lakes states, Biden is running an ad that extols the virtues of his working-class Pennsylvania hometown. In states with large Latino populations, Spanish-language ads emphasize his family and his Catholic faith.

Broadcast Television Ad Spending

Cumulative purchases for May–November 2020

• Trump campaign
• Biden campaign

Trump is running ads in Minnesota and Wisconsin that blamed Biden for “chaos” in Upper Midwestern cities following police violence against Black men. But in Georgia and North Carolina, two states with large Black populations, he’s criticized Biden’s sponsorship of crime bills with long mandatory sentences for some drug crimes.

Trump plans to spend 83% of his ad budget to keep states he won in 2016. Almost half of that has been earmarked for just Florida, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. Biden is spreading his ad money across 15 states, including former Republican bastions of Texas and Georgia.

On paper, the campaigns are evenly matched going into Labor Day: Trump has reserved $148 million in air time while Democratic nominee Joe Biden, who got a later start, has reserved $135 million. But depending on fund-raising the final tallies could be twice that.