Spies and Swing States

International Intrigue and Electoral College Math

International Intrigue, WSJ-style

Illustration Credit: Alexandra Citrin-Safadi/WSJ

My husband Eddie devours stories about spies and special ops. By this point I’m pretty much an authority on matters of international intrigue too just by proximity. Tom Clancy weaves a mighty fine tale, but no work of fiction can compete with the real-life effort it took to bring Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich back home to the United States yesterday. For more than a year, the 32 year old Gershkovich was wrongfully detained in a Russian penal colony on charges of espionage trumped up by the Kremlin as part of an international chess match between Russia and the West.

The Wall Street Journal has removed its (typically aggressive) paywall to share this wild, winding story with the world. It’s quite long, but you should read it. It will be told in a big screen or small screen format one day, but it’s beautifully crafted and impressively reported right here. You can also find it by clicking on the terrifying illustration above.

One of the main takeaways from this story is the importance of diplomacy. President Joe Biden was able to orchestrate this complicated deal to bring home a number of high-profile political prisoners from multiple countries because Biden has cultivated strong relationships with other world leaders.

As Biden was working to execute a multilayered, multi-country prisoner exchange, an effort that spanned years and actually predated Gershkovich’s detainment, the Republican nominee for president declared in February (in Conway, South Carolina!) that Russia should “do whatever the hell they want” to any NATO country that doesn’t spend the target amount of 2% of its GDP on national defense. Trump’s comment was immediately rebuked by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

I’ll spend time another day waxing poetic about NATO, but for now I just want to share one nugget from the WSJ piece:

Two days later, President Biden sent a letter to Scholz, a formal request that gave the Chancellor the mechanism he needed to formalize a deal. […]

Through June and July U.S. intelligence officials met with their Russian counterparts in Middle Eastern capitals, while German negotiators held their own meetings. In Washington, Sullivan scrambled to sew up the deal just as an open insurrection erupted by Democrats hoping Biden would end his bid for a second term. Biden was hosting a July NATO summit, hoping a lively performance would quell doubts. […]

From self-quarantine in his Delaware home, Biden, testing positive for COVID-19, was tuning out frenzied speculation about his future to push the deal over its finish line. Slovenia still needed to tick through the final legal arrangements to ship back the spies it held—and time was running out. […] Biden called Prime Minister Robert Golob to nudge things along, adding wistfully: “I’ve really got to get to Slovenia.” About an hour later, he announced he was leaving the presidential race.

The final deal coming together was unprecedented in its scale and complexity.

So, yeah, a month or so ago while pundits were yelling on TV about Biden’s whereabouts that fateful weekend, it turns out he was busy finalizing the biggest international prisoner swap since the Cold War. And the linchpin of the whole thing was ol’ Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor Donald Trump offended just a few months prior with his treacherous words about the NATO alliance.

---

The Right Plouffe

Kamala Harris’s campaign has brought some new faces and voices in their top brass, including my old boss(’s boss’s boss’s boss’s boss) David Plouffe, the mastermind behind Barack Obama’s 2008 operation. A campaign insider tells POLITICO: “He’s coming in for a very specific role. He’s not senior-advising the whole campaign. He’s senior advisor on 270 stuff.”

Photo Credit: CNN

Plouffe (pronounced like our Lowcountry mud) is a nuts and bolts guy. In the 2008 primary, his strategy from the get-go was to focus on “delegate math” and the long game. He sent field organizers to typically low-turnout caucus states like Kansas, Idaho, and even Alaska to take advantage of weird caucus rules and ensure that Obama collected as many delegates to the national convention as possible. These were states that had almost certainly never seen paid campaign workers. And it worked! Though Hillary Clinton remained in the contest until every state had voted, Plouffe’s primary strategy had locked up the majority of delegate votes months before states had finished voting.

What does this have to do with the 2024 general election? Democratic convention delegate votes are no longer a concern, but electoral math is. Democrats have a systemic disadvantage in the electoral college, something I will explain in another newsletter since this one is already getting long. Because of this disadvantage, Democrats need to run up the score in the popular vote to safely claim an electoral college victory. (270 = the number of electoral votes necessary to win the election.)

Polling hasn’t settled since the race was turned upside down with Biden’s departure. Currently Harris and Trump are locked in a dead heat, and Trump appears to have more paths to 270 electoral votes than Harris does.

The Blue Wall

You may have heard the term “blue wall” in election coverage the last few years. These are the three states Biden’s paths to victory depended on in 2020 and 2024 – Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Obama won them in 2008 and 2012 and Trump in 2016. They flipped back to Biden in 2020. The second tier of swing states this go ‘round includes Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina. (Biden won all of those but North Carolina, which he lost by the slimmest of margins. Trump won them all in 2016.)

Photo Credit: Cook Political Report

Since Biden and Harris are in fact different candidates, their paths to 270 aren’t necessarily the same. The electorates of the so-called “Sunbelt” states seem to be friendlier to Harris’s candidacy than the “blue wall” states, which are better-suited for a candidate like Biden.

Plouffe’s job will be to look at the maps and the maths and help decide where to deploy the campaign’s resources to get Harris to 270 electoral votes.

But just to make things interesting – and to keep you up at night if you worry about these things – there’s a very real possibility that this election could end up in an electoral college TIE. This isn’t unprecedented, but it’s been a minute. The election of 1800, a contest between Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr, resulted in an electoral college tie. The election was tossed to the House of Representatives, and Jefferson was deemed the winner. (This debacle gave rise to the 12th Amendment to the Constitution, which revised the electoral college process.)

The scarier relevant example, though, is the election of 1824. This race didn’t end in a tie, but no candidate secured the requisite electoral vote threshold. In a so-called “Corrupt Bargain,” the House of Representatives anointed John Quincy Adams the winner, despite the fact that Andrew Jackson had won the most electoral votes. Jackson roared back and crushed JQA in a rematch four years later.

A 2024 Tie?

This is what a tie would look like in 2024:

Eagle-eyed observers may notice something weird going on in Maine and Nebraska.

Maine and Nebraska are the only states in the country that are not “winner-take-all” in electoral college votes. Instead, they allocate two electoral votes to the state’s popular vote winner and then one electoral vote to the popular vote winner in each congressional district (2 in Maine, 3 in Nebraska).

In a race as close as this one, voter turnout in one or both of these random congressional districts could conceivably swing the election – or send it to the House of Representatives.

We’ll explore that nightmare scenario another day. For now, I’ll sleep sounder knowing David Plouffe is tending to the maps and the maths.

Thanks for nerding out with me, and congrats on making it to the end of this thing. I appreciate your readership and hope you have a wonderful weekend.

Laurin