The Biden Map

With Delaware's governor set to lift the COVID-19-based stay-at-home order this coming Monday (June 1), Joe Biden may finally be a free man, with the ability to make the public campaign appearances he so obviously loves and gets energy from.  But the Biden campaign is still focused on expanding its digital operations, where Trump currently holds an advantage.  Biden is not only looking to hold on to key "battleground" states Hillary Clinton won in 2016 and take back the blue firewall states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin but also attempt to make inroads in other states Trump won more comfortably than the blue firewall states and also in states where Hillary Clinton had no chance at all - but she went for them anyway.  Biden's electoral battleground map below should explain it.

All of the states in color are states where Biden is ahead or competitive in the polls.  The dark blue states are the states the Democrats won in 2016 - barely, in some cases, as in Minnesota - that Biden hopes to hold onto.  The light blue states are states unsuccessfully targeted by the Democrats in 2016 that Biden hopes to fight more vigorously in.  The lavender states are solidly Republican states where Trump is slipping and where Biden has the outside chance Hillary Clinton thought she had, based on current polling.  Arizona, which is becoming more bipartisan, is no surprise, and Florida isn't either.  But look at Texas, will ya?  Trump is actually beating Biden by only a few points there, which means that Trump is vulnerable in the Lone Star State. And even though it's not targeted on his map, he's only a couple of points behind Trump in Republican Utah - Utah, the Mormon homeland, perhaps the most socially conservative theocracy west of Iran.  Now that's news. 

The diagonal-line states of Maine and Nebraska are targeted for their awarding of only two electoral votes on a statewide winner-take-all basis, the other electoral votes awarded based on who carries which U.S. House district.  Trump will likely win Nebraska's two electors representing the state, of course, but with three House districts each choosing one elector, Biden can possibly pick off one elector in the Democratic-friendly Omaha-based district, as Barack Obama did in 2008.  And I have a feeling that Biden's looking to sweep Maine.

I got this map in an e-mail from the Biden campaign asking for donations.  I'm not giving away campaign secrets here; the Trump campaign is obviously looking at the same map and the same polls.  And I'm sure the Trump campaign recognizes what Biden has to do as much as the Biden campaign folks themselves.

"Every organizer we're able to put to work in these critical battleground states translates to more votes for Joe Biden on Election Day," the Biden campaign explained in its e-mail.  "And we're working on developing innovative ways for organizers to reach out to voters safely, allowing us to champion social distancing standards as long as we need to while not sacrificing any of the groundwork we need to do.  We’re not taking a single vote for granted, so we've got to make sure every voter in every state on this map hears directly from someone on our campaign about Joe's plans for our country."

Biden has his work cut out for him despite his consistent leads in the polls over the past couple of months.  He may have survived Burisma and his son Hunter's involvement in that, and he may have even survived the Tara Reade story (though far too many people seem to believe Reade, including the increasingly insufferable congresswomen known as the Squad), but now he has to deal with doubts among black voters, and Bernie bros still won't give him any quarter (or quarters - 97 percent of Sanders supporters have failed to donate money to the Biden campaign).  However, Biden's overall strategy and his increasingly liberal policy positions (made possible by a pandemic) show that he is taking this campaign far more seriously than one might think.