"Washington has trouble seeing us": Midwestern Political Culture and the 2024 Presidential Election

The results of quadrennial American presidential races are determined by many factors.In 2024, the factors included President Joe Biden's health; popular reaction to Biden's choice of his successor as the Democratic nominee, Vice-President Kamala Harris; the level of support for GOP candidate Donald Trump; inflation; Ukraine; Gaza; abortion; foreign trade; the Latino vote; and, inter alia, immigration.The most obvious and oft-repeated Midwestern angle to the campaign was the fate of the electoral votes of Michigan and Wisconsin, which had become critical swing states in presidential contests.Large parts of the Midwest were no longer in that category.Iowa, Missouri, and Ohio, which had for many decades been bellwether states in American politics, had moved into the reliably red column, joining the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, and Indiana as dependable Republican bastions.Illinois and Minnesota, whose politics are both dominated by a single urban core, remained blue states, but less blue in 2024 than some expected.Michigan and Wisconsin were 2024's main battle fronts and they, along with Pennsylvania, constituted the celebrated "Blue Wall" of Democratic support in the mid-Atlantic/industrial Midwest.From the beginning of the campaign, Democrats banked their fortunes on the Blue Wall.Worries about "cracks" in the wall became an overworked metaphor.In mid-October, the Democratic governors of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania launched a hastily-arranged Midwestern bus tour in Wausau and tried to reverse an apparent Democratic slide in the region.On election night, as tensions mounted over the ultimate voting results, Harris campaign manager Jennifer O'Malley Dillon circulated a memo that dismissed the importance of other battleground states in the South and West and emphasized that "we have known all along that our clearest path to 270