Speaker 1:
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Chris Krueger:
Good morning. Welcome back to TD Cowen Street Cred. I am Chris Krueger with TD Cowen's Washington Research Group, and we'll attempt to translate K Street to Wall Street faster than a speeding Acela and even faster if you juice up the playback. We're now five for five on Tuesday mornings with three weeks until election day when voting ends. Voting has been underway in numerous states for weeks with a number of the battleground states starting this week. With 21 days until the election hopefully ends wanted to flag those seven key battleground states and what to watch. Okay. Geography, presidential elections are not national elections, but a test of mathematics and geography within the Electoral College 270 votes from a collection of states brings with it the White House. The map we're looking at this time around largely tracks 2020 with the so-called Battery Belt of the two big regions, you've got the Sun Belt, core four of Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and North Carolina, combined with the so-called Rust Belt of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
Okay. The seven key states in alphabetical order. First up, Arizona. This will have it all. You've got the Presidential Senate race and a bellwether house race. Democrats picked up the Governor's Mansion in the midterms. That's a pretty constant theme throughout with these battlegrounds. The other thing to keep an eye on in Arizona, the near-total abortion ban from 1864 was overturned but is likely to feature prominently in campaigns. Again, another tailwind from the midterms that the Democrats really outperformed their polling averages and expectations. All right, next state up is not surprisingly, Georgia, the Harris-Walz campaign had their first joint post-convention stop here. Trump has been here almost constantly. One kind of local issue to watch has been Trump's... He's now stopped, but for a number of years, Trump just had withering attacks on the very popular Republican governor as well as the governor's wife. That's something that a lot of those core Republican voters will be probably thinking about as they head to the polls.
This is a place as well where Nikki Haley got a little over 75,000 votes in the 2024 primary, not nearly as much as the 110,000 in Arizona, but that's a core demographic to keep an eye on in a state like Georgia. Okay, first state in the Rust Belt, Michigan. Michigan super unique in the Rust Belt in that home to many college campuses, as well as very large Arab American population centers in both Dearborn and Detroit. Israel-Gaza policy has been a major topic. Just like Arizona Democrats had a really good midterm here, Gretchen Whitmer, as well as flipping the state legislature, the Harris UAW endorsement also a big deal. Okay. Heading southeast from the big house North Carolina. North Carolina is one of also the three states we're watching on election night, along with Virginia and Florida, mainly because all three of those states close early. They're on the East Coast and they count relatively quickly.
North Carolina, it's a state Donald Trump won twice. Obama won it in 2008 by about 14,000 votes, and Democrats have had a pretty successful time winning the governor's race there. Spoiler alert, they're probably going to win the governor's race again. This is a problem for Republicans in that their gubernatorial candidate has basically been disavowed by the Republican Governors Association. The RGA having pulled all their TV spend as well as a lot of their get-out-the-vote efforts that would've really given the Trump campaign a bit of a tailwind. Sadly, the hurricane devastation in North Carolina, largely in the western part of the state outside of Asheville, that's heavily a pro-Trump region. Just given the lack of mail, the potential problems with election infrastructure machinery wouldn't be surprised at all to see a lot of litigation coming out of North Carolina. Early voting was delayed to remove Robert Kennedy Jr's name from the ballots.
He successfully sued to have his name removed, so the early vote was already complicated and susceptible to litigation. So I think if there is a lot of litigation on election night or in election winter, it's probably out of Georgia and North Carolina the most. Okay. Nevada also a very close state that has as well as the presidential with six electoral college votes. It's also got a marquee Senate race. The Latino vote really critical for both campaigns in this state. This is also the state that is ground zero for the no tax on tips, which if you look at the center of the policy Venn Diagram of Harris and Trump, that's one area where you do have alignment. Okay, just two to go, but we saved the big one as the penultimate state. That's Pennsylvania. Democrats pretty well ran the table in the midterms here, but midterm and special election electorates a lot different than presidential elections.
If you could only pick one state that would determine the winner, I think it continues to be Pennsylvania, arguably the key for 270. So as goes, Pennsylvania goes the nation, even if you give Harris some of those core Sun Belt states of Arizona and Nevada as well as Michigan and Wisconsin, she's still shy. Really hard to see Harris's arithmetic to 270 without the Pennsylvania vote. Really, the 19 votes being the so-called spine of the Electoral College syllabus. All right, last but certainly not least, the 10 electoral votes coming out of Wisconsin. When you're looking at Wisconsin on election night, it's probably going to be those suburbs around Milwaukee, probably one of the three most critical regions to watch alongside the Philly and Detroit suburbs. Okay. That's a wrap. This has been Chris Krueger with TD Cowen's Washington Research Group for Street Cred.
Speaker 1:
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