Kamala Harris hit the road today for campaign events in the three battleground states that make up her clearest possible path to victory: Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. In each state, Harris is holding sit-down discussions with the former congresswoman Liz Cheney, her most prominent conservative surrogate.
With just over two weeks before Election Day, the appearances are designed to appeal to the tiny fraction of voters who could prove decisive in a race that our chief political analyst Nate Cohn says can hardly get any closer. The Harris team hopes the events will help them attract moderate, suburban, Republican women, a demographic her campaign believes can be cleaved away from Donald Trump in sufficient numbers to win key states.
Harris has been able to spend more time with voters, and less with donors, because her fund-raising efforts have broken records. Behind the scenes, the Harris and Trump campaigns have also dug through data to find the last remaining undecided voters. They both think many are younger, Black or Latino, and the Harris team is also eyeing white, college-educated women.
On the campaign trail
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Your questions: We asked Lisa Lerer, our national political correspondent, this question from a reader. (Send us your questions here.)
Where do voters living in the nonswing states find the motivation to vote? — Marcel Schutte, the Netherlands
Lisa: Voters living in nonswing states are still casting ballots for a list of other statewide and local offices, so their votes do matter in those races. There’s also a sense of sending a political message. While New York or Texas is unlikely to change the outcome of the presidential race, shifts in party support in those states can impact the political mandate a new president has to lead.
Scrapping the electoral college would require a constitutional amendment, which would face an extraordinarily — if not nearly impossible — bar to passage. With no clear way to change the system, most Americans focus on more pressing concerns, like the economy, immigration, abortion rights or even foreign policy.