The 2024 presidential race is heating up, and MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki provided a sobering update on Tuesday as Vice President Kamala Harris gears up for her highly anticipated debate with former President Donald Trump. Kornacki’s analysis highlighted the razor-thin margins in key battleground states that could decide the next President of the United States.
As the fall campaign season intensifies, Kornacki presented the latest polling data on MSNBC, revealing that Harris holds a narrow three-point lead over Trump in the national average of major polls. While this slight edge might seem encouraging for Democrats, it’s far from a guarantee of victory. Kornacki cautioned that national polls can be misleading, especially when it comes to predicting outcomes in the Electoral College. “Kamala Harris is in a better position than Joe Biden was earlier this year when he was consistently trailing Trump in the polls,” Kornacki explained. “But a three-point lead nationally isn’t much comfort for Democrats when you look at how Trump has performed in the past.”
Trump’s knack for overcoming deficits and gaining traction in key states is a factor Democrats cannot ignore. Kornacki emphasized seven crucial battleground states likely to determine the election: Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, and North Carolina. While six of these states went blue in 2020, Trump is already making significant inroads, especially in Pennsylvania, where Republicans see a chance to turn the state red again.
“For Harris, the path to victory is clear but narrow,” Kornacki said as he displayed his “Road to 270” map. “If she can hold on to the Great Lakes states—Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania—she reaches the magic number of 270 electoral votes. But if she slips up, particularly in Pennsylvania, her road to the White House gets a lot more complicated.” Kornacki explained that if Harris loses Pennsylvania, she would need to secure at least two states from the Sun Belt, where Trump is highly competitive. Conversely, Trump’s most straightforward path to victory involves winning Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Georgia. Securing these three swing states would give him exactly 270 electoral votes, just enough to reclaim the presidency.
Pennsylvania has consistently been a critical battleground state with razor-thin margins. In the 2020 election, Biden narrowly won Pennsylvania with about 50% of the vote, compared to Trump’s 49%, flipping the state back to blue after Trump’s 2016 victory. In that earlier election, Trump won Pennsylvania with roughly 48.2% of the vote, while Hillary Clinton received 47.5%. This victory was significant as it marked the first time a Republican presidential candidate had won Pennsylvania since 1988.
Last month, Kornacki examined the electoral history of Minnesota to see if the “rural appeal” Gov. Tim Walz has been charged with bringing to the Harris campaign really exists. “That background – the small town background, the military background – Democrats are hoping it’s gonna help them. You’re hearing a lot about this, here as we take a look at our battleground map. They’re hoping it’s going to help them in these three very familiar battleground states we always talk about: Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. The reason, obviously, from the Electoral College standpoint, is why these are so important, bu the challenge for Democrats in these three states has been pretty straightforward for a long time now,” Kornacki began.
“Democrats have been cleaning up, increasingly so, in the suburbs of Philadelphia, suburbs of Pittsburgh, suburbs of Detroit, suburbs of Grand Rapids, and even suburbs of Milwaukee, which used to be hardcore Republican. Much, much less so in the Trump era. So, the Democrats have been doing really, really well in the suburbs. Where they need help in these states, and why these states have been so close, and why Trump even won all three of these states in 2016, is the sort of small-town rural core of each one of these states,” he continued.
“That’s where Trump and the Republicans have been surging since 2016. That’s where the Democrats have been losing ground. The Democrats used to do pretty well in a lot of these places. No more. So, the hope is that, for Democrats, Walz’s background, his story, will be familiar to voters in those places and will help them in those states,” he said.
