Why Pennsylvania is so important to the Harris-Walz campaign

While several swing states could influence the outcome of the 2024 election, political scientist, lawyer, and U.S. elections expert Dr. David Schultz believes that Kamala Harris’s path to victory likely hinges on Pennsylvania. According to the Hamline University professor, the election will probably be decided by a narrow margin of 150,000 to 200,000 votes spread across seven key swing states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

The Kamala Harris campaign has adopted a strategy that aligns with Dr. Schultz’s analysis. Last week, Jen O’Malley-Dillon, Harris’s campaign manager, released a video outlining how the vice president has multiple paths to victory in these states.

During our interview, Dr. Schultz pointed out that while the other Blue Wall states, Michigan and Wisconsin, are also critical battlegrounds, Pennsylvania’s 19 electoral college votes make a Harris victory much more likely.

“For Harris, if she can’t win Pennsylvania, her math gets much more complicated,” explained the political scientist. For Donald Trump, Pennsylvania helps push him across the finish line. However, “if he sweeps North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona,” he could afford to lose Pennsylvania and still surpass the magic number of 270 electoral college votes.

The politics of the vice presidential pick

Some may highlight the close polling in Pennsylvania and question whether the Harris campaign made a mistake by not selecting Governor Josh Shapiro as her running mate. However, Dr. Schultz does not believe that choosing Governor Shapiro would have guaranteed the vice president a victory in Pennsylvania. “One of the conventional wisdoms, which is actually not true generally, is that vice presidential candidates matter,” said Schultz in our conversation when asked directly about the circumstances of Harris’ VP pick.

Dr. Schultz pointed to the 2008 race as a recent example of a race in which a VP pick made the difference.

Though that may sound surprising, Dr. Schultz noted that “about 40% of the Americans cannot name at any given time who the sitting vice president.” If such a large portion of the population is unaware of who the person is, Dr. Schultz sees it as a stretch that a notable percentage of the voting public would make up their mind based on the running mate of either major party.

The one caveat provided by the election expert was that in this specific race where it is expected to be so close, picking Governor Shapiro “might be enough in that state” even if he “only moved 2, 3, 4000 voters.” However, when making these sorts of decisions, trying to target such specific voters, one ventures into what Dr. Schultz described as “the logic of small numbers.”