Focus of New Yorkers backing Biden or Trump is on 7 swing states

WASHINGTON — For the next six months, the focus of the presidential campaigns and for the New Yorkers who want to help their candidate succeed will be on seven states that many analysts say will determine who will win the Nov. 5 election.

Since becoming the presumptive presidential candidates two months ago, President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump have stepped up their appearances and their aligned committees have begun running more ads in those states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Poll after poll focuses on the national popularity horse race between Biden and Trump, but political analyst Charlie Cook of the Cook Political Report cautioned a week ago in his column: “It isn’t just how many votes a candidate gets, but exactly where they get them.”

The 2024 presidential race looks like a rematch of the 2020 election that Biden won with narrow victories in six of the same seven swing states, losing to Trump only in North Carolina by less than 1% of the vote.

At this point, half a year away from the election, Biden trails Trump in several polls and the averages of those polls by news and data websites RealClearPolitics and FiveThirtyEight, although those results remain very close for three or four of the states.

Some political analysts say the result of the presidential election could be decided in metropolitan and suburban areas of such states, home to swing voters who are moderate, young or undecided.

In 2020, Biden won by a combined 42,921 votes in Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin. Had he lost those votes, he would have been in a tie with Trump in electoral votes — that’s how close the race was four years ago and likely how close it could be again this year.

New York outreach

Few think New York will be up for grabs in this year’s election, but some New Yorkers are working to help either Biden or Trump by reaching out to voters in swing states or with contributions to the campaign committees and super PACs to run ads there.

On Friday, Trump invited outside groups supporting him, including Heritage Action and Turning Point Action, to Palm Beach, Florida, to discuss working together, followed by a three-day retreat for top donors, according to Politico.

Meanwhile, groups aligned with Democrats aim to bolster turnout for Biden. Swing Left, for example, a national group with chapters in New York City and on Long Island, spends funds and recruits volunteers to build support for Democratic candidates.

Leslie Pascaud, a chief marketing officer for a digital medical trials company who splits her time between Shelter Island and New York City, told Newsday that Swing Left volunteers write and make phone calls to voters selected through research of voting records.

Adrianne Davis, a Copiague political activist working with Swing Left, said she plans to travel to Pennsylvania or another swing state this year to knock on doors to talk to voters and encourage them to vote for Biden and other Democrats.

“This is a really smart way to target battlegrounds to make a difference where differences could be made,” Davis told Newsday.

Paying for ads

New Yorkers also help pay the enormous tab of political advertising to back Trump or Biden in swing states. New York is the second-largest source of donations to Biden’s campaign with $19.1 million in the last 15 months and the fourth-largest to Trump’s with $4.1 million, according to OpenSecrets, a nonprofit that tracks political money. 

During the past two weeks, the Biden campaign spent $6.3 million on advertising, including $1.4 million on digital ads, according to AdImpact, a company that tracks advertising placements. The Biden Victory Fund spent an additional $526,000 on digital ads.

The Trump campaign did not pay for ads, but MAGA Inc., the super PAC backing Trump, spent $2.9 million on ads and the Trump National Committee Joint Fundraising Committee spent $535,000 on digital ads, according to AdImpact.

AdImpact projects presidential general election spending for the 2024 election will rise to $2.1 billion, with three quarters of that amount focusing on the seven swing states.

The Democratic-aligned Future Forward PAC already has placed $130.2 million in ad reservations in those states from August through Election Day, according to AdImpact 

Tracking turnout

As in every election, turnout of supporters is the key to winning.

David Schultz, a professor of political science at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota and editor of “Presidential Swing States,” a collection of academic articles, told Newsday he sees a narrower battlefield this year than in 2020 for Biden and Trump.

“I think the race comes down to 5% of the voters in five counties in five states that will decide the election,” he said.

Schultz's picks: Maricopa County, Arizona, home of Phoenix; Fulton County, Georgia, with Atlanta; Wayne County, Michigan, with Detroit; Alleghany County, Pennsylvania, with Pittsburgh; and Brown County, Wisconsin, with Green Bay or Door County to the northeast.

If turnout for Biden by women, people of color and voters under 30 in these counties is weak, Trump wins, Schultz said.

Lawrence Levy, executive dean of the National Center for Suburban Studies at Hofstra University, told Newsday he is focused on suburban counties in the seven swing states. Biden long has relied on suburban votes, Levy said.

“Of course, recreating his urban-suburban coalition isn’t going to be easy for Biden, given the blame he’s received for a bipartisan immigration mess, the intraparty feuding over the Israel-Hamas war, the leakage of previously loyal Latino voters and denial that the economy is soaring,” Levy said in a CNN opinion piece last week.

“Biden needs the suburbs to save his political life,” Levy said.