Presidential campaigns have to make choices about where to pour most of their resources in the final stretch up to the election on November 5th. As many people know, the Electoral College system in the US is such that there are just seven states known as ‘swing’ or ‘battleground’ states (Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, and North Carolina) that play an outsize role in that they are seen as the only ones in contention, while the results of the other 43 states and the District of Columbia are seen as foregone conclusions for one party or the other and not worth campaigning in.

Campaigns need to decide whether they want to go on the offense and ‘expand the map’ (as the cool kids say) by making an effort in non-swing states that are leaning towards the opponents but that they think they have a chance of flipping. For the Democrats, these would be states like Indiana, Iowa, and Florida. Florida has been a tease for them for a long time. The demographics of the state with its rising percentage of Hispanic voters has long seemed promising but each election has seen their hopes dashed, with Republicans winning it comfortably. Republicans have fewer options in prying states out of Democratic hands. New Hampshire, Minnesota, and Virginia used to be possibilities but recently they have gone Democratic and there are reports that the GOP has given up on them, although both New Hampshire and Virginia have Republican governors. Alternatively, campaigns can decide they want to play defense, focusing only on the swing states that they think they have a good chance of winning and have sufficient electoral college votes to put them over the top, and largely ignoring the others.

Even some of the swing states may not be that, well, swingy. North Carolina, while being portrayed as a swing state, was last won by Democrats way back in 2008 with Barack Obama and is a stretch for Democrats. However, it has a fairly liberal Democratic governor in Roy Cooper and the GOP is fielding an extremist (Mark Robinson) for governor this time around. Josh Stein, North Carolina’s attorney general and the Democratic nominee to succeed Cooper, has been consistently leading Robinson in the polls. This gives Democrats some hope that they can pull it away from the GOP, though statewide elections for governor and senator do not track perfectly with voters’ presidential preferences.

A re-energized Democratic electorate has been visible in polling data, which now shows the state as tied. Part of that is the roughly 20% of North Carolinians who are Black; increased African American voter turnout helped Obama win the state in 2008.

But the enthusiasm is far more widespread, and was visible this week, when Harris drew 25,000 people to two rallies this week, one in Charlotte and another a few hours later in Greensboro. It was the vice-president’s 17th trip to North Carolina and her ninth just this year.
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Democrats have long expected a brutal fight in North Carolina, and have been investing time, money and personnel into the state for the last year.
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The Democratic party has 26 field offices in North Carolina with 240 paid staff, according to the campaign. The choices of placement for some of the offices, such as rural Wilson county in the state’s “Black belt” and Lenoir in western mountain country, speak to movement away from a focus on high-density urban territory that’s friendly to Democrats.

Ideally one would go both wide and deep, offense and defense, but using resources on one kind of effort necessarily takes away resources from the other. At this stage, the most valuable resources are campaign staff and volunteers to knock on doors and register and get people to vote early and on election day. Decisions on where to invest resources are often based on internal polls done by the parties which are not released to the public. Sometimes they are also feints, part of the psychological battle. A party might announce that they are spending some resources such as making ad buys in a state that they really do not think they can win but just in order to scare the opponents into pouring resources into that state that they had not planned to do before, just in order to defend it.

Similar ‘go wide or go deep’ strategic decisions need to be made within a state as well, because states are not homogeneous. Typically, large urban and suburban areas tend to favor Democrats while rural areas tend to favor Republicans. So Democrats need to decide whether to pour most of their resources into areas where they are already strong in order to run up the score there to overcome the GOP advantage in the other areas, or whether they should try to reach supporters in rural areas (and even win over ambivalent voters there) in order to chip away the winning margin of the GOP there.

Pennsylvania is a particularly interesting case. There are two very big urban centers in Pittsburgh (on the western end of the state) and Philadelphia (on the eastern end) with large swathes of conservative rural areas in between. I have a friend who lives in central Pennsylvania and he says that people describe the state politically as “Philly and Pitt with Alabama in the middle”. Recently, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz have been visiting rural areas in Pennsylvania (and also in Georgia) in what seems like a ‘go wide’ strategy in that state. (Marcus Ranum at stderr is also a resident of rural Pennsylvania and one should look out for any posts by him on the state of play there, since his insights would be very valuable.)

As a rule of thumb, a campaign that is going wide tends to be one that is feeling confident while one that is going deep tends to be the one that is insecure and feels the need to consolidate its base of support.