President Joe Biden won a decisive Electoral College victory in 2020 by restoring old Democratic advantages in the Rust Belt while establishing new beachheads in the Sun Belt.

But this year, his position in polls has weakened on both fronts. The result is that, even this far from Election Day, signs are developing that Biden could face a last-mile problem in the Electoral College.

Even a modest recovery in Biden’s current support could put him in position to win states worth 255 Electoral College votes, strategists in both parties agree. His problem is that every option for capturing the final 15 Electoral College votes he would need to reach a winning majority of 270 looks significantly more difficult.

At this point, former President Donald Trump’s gains have provided him with more plausible alternatives to cross the last mile to 270. Trump’s personal vulnerabilities, Biden’s edge in building a campaign organization, and abortion rights’ prominence in several key swing states could erase that advantage. But for now, Biden looks to have less margin for error than the former president.

[Read: Will Biden have a Gaza problem in November’s poll?]

Biden’s odds may particularly diminish if he cannot hold all three of the former “blue wall” states across the Rust Belt that he recaptured in 2020 after Trump had taken them four years earlier: Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Biden is running more competitively in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin than in any other swing states. But in Michigan, Biden has struggled in most polls, whipsawed by defections among multiple groups Democrats rely on, including Arab Americans, auto workers, young people, and Black Americans.

As James Carville, the veteran Democratic strategist told me, if Biden can recover to win Michigan along with Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, “you are not going to lose.” But, Carville added, if Biden can’t hold all three, “you are going to have to catch an inside straight to win.”

For both campaigns, the math of the next Electoral College map starts with the results from the last campaign. In 2020, Biden won 25 states, the District of Columbia and a congressional district centered on Omaha, in Nebraska—one of the two states that awards some of its Electoral College votes by district. Last time, Trump won 25 states and a rural congressional district in Maine, the other state that awards some of its electors by district.

The places Biden won are worth 303 Electoral College votes in 2024; Trump’s places are worth 235. Biden’s advantage disappears, though, when looking at the states that appear to be securely in each side’s grip.

Of the 25 states Trump won, North Carolina was the only one he carried by less than three percentage points; Florida was the only other state Trump won by less than four points.

It’s not clear that Biden can truly threaten Trump in either state. Biden’s campaign, stressing criticism of Florida’s six-week abortion ban that went into effect today, has signaled some interest in contesting the state. But amid all the signs of Florida’s rightward drift in recent years, few operatives in either party believe the Biden campaign will undertake the enormous investment required to fully compete there.

Biden’s team has committed to a serious push in North Carolina. There, he could be helped by a gubernatorial race that pits Democratic Attorney General Josh Stein against Republican Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson, a social conservative who has described LGBTQ people as “filth” and spoken favorably about the era when women could not vote. Democrats also believe that Biden can harvest discontent over the 12-week abortion ban that the GOP-controlled state legislature passed last year

But Democrats have not won a presidential or U.S. Senate race in North Carolina since 2008. Despite Democratic gains in white-collar suburbs around Charlotte and Raleigh, Trump’s campaign believes that a steady flow of conservative-leaning white retirees from elsewhere is tilting the state to the right; polls to this point consistently show Trump leading, often by comfortable margins.

Biden has a much greater area of vulnerable terrain to defend. In 2020, he carried three of his 25 states by less than a single percentage point—Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin—and won Pennsylvania by a little more than one point. He also won Michigan and Nevada by about 2.5 percentage points each; in all, Biden carried six states by less than three points, compared with just one for Trump. Even Minnesota and New Hampshire, both of which Biden won by about seven points, don’t look entirely safe for him in 2024, though he remains favored in each.

Many operatives in both parties separate the six states Biden carried most narrowly into three distinct tiers. Biden has looked best in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Biden’s position has been weakest in Arizona, Nevada, and Georgia. Michigan falls into its own tier in between.

This ranking and Trump’s consistent lead in North Carolina reflect the upside-down racial dynamics of the 2024 race to this point. As Democrats always do, Biden still runs better among voters of color than among white voters. But the trend in support since 2020 has defied the usual pattern. Both state and national polls, as I’ve written, regularly show Biden closely matching the share of the vote he won in 2020 among white voters. But these same polls routinely show Trump significantly improving on his 2020 performance among Black and Latino voters, especially men. Biden is also holding much more of his 2020 support among seniors than he is among young people.

These demographic patterns are shaping the geography of the 2024 race. They explain why Biden has lost more ground since 2020 in the racially diverse and generally younger Sun Belt states than he has in the older and more preponderantly white Rust Belt states. Slipping support among voters of color (primarily Black voters) threatens Biden in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin too, but the danger for him isn’t as great as in the Sun Belt states, where minorities are a much larger share of the total electorate. Biden running better in the swing states that are less, rather than more, diverse “is an irony that we’re not used to,” says Bradley Beychok, a co-founder of the liberal advocacy group American Bridge 21st Century, which is running a massive campaign to reach mostly white swing voters in the Rust Belt battlegrounds.

Given these unexpected patterns, Democratic strategists I’ve spoken with this year almost uniformly agree with Carville that the most promising route for Biden to reach 270 Electoral College votes goes through the traditional industrial battlegrounds of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. “If you look at all the battleground-state polling, and don’t get too fixated on this poll or that, the polling consistently shows you that Biden runs better in the three industrial Midwest states than he does in the four swing Sun Belt states,” Doug Sosnik, who served as the chief White House political strategist for Bill Clinton, told me.

Democratic hopes for a Biden reelection almost all start with him holding Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, where polls now generally show a dead heat. If Biden wins both and holds all the states that he won in 2020 by at least three points—as well as Washington, D.C., and the Omaha congressional district—that would bring the president to 255 Electoral College votes. At that point, even if Biden loses all of the Sun Belt battlegrounds, he could reach the 270-vote threshold just by taking Michigan, with its 15 votes, as well.

But Michigan has been a persistent weak spot for Biden. Although a CBS News/YouGov poll released Sunday showed Biden narrowly leading Trump in Michigan, most polls for months have shown the former president, who campaigned there today, reliably ahead. “In all the internal polling I’m seeing and doing in Michigan, I’ve never had Joe Biden leading Donald Trump,” Richard Czuba, an independent Michigan pollster who conducts surveys for business and civic groups, told me.

[Read: How Trump is dividing minority voters]

Czuba doesn’t consider Michigan out of reach for Biden. He believes that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has qualified for the ballot, will ultimately draw more votes from Trump. Democrats have also rebuilt a formidable political organization, he noted, while the state Republican Party is in disarray, which will help Biden in a close race. And defending abortion rights remains a powerful advantage for Democrats, Czuba said, with Governor Gretchen Whitmer an effective and popular messenger for that cause.

But Czuba said Biden is facing obstacles in Michigan that extend beyond his often-discussed problems with Arab American voters over the war in Gaza, discontent on college campuses around the same issue, and Trump’s claim that the transition to electric vehicles will produce a “bloodbath” for the auto industry. Biden is also deeply unpopular among independents in the state, Czuba said concerns about his age are a principal concern. “That’s the overriding issue we’re hearing,” he told me. “I don’t think any of those independents voted for Joe Biden thinking he was going to run for reelection.” On top of all that, Sunday’s CBS News/YouGov poll showed Trump winning about one in six Black voters in Michigan, roughly double his share in 2020.

If Biden can’t win Michigan, his remaining options for reaching 270 Electoral College votes are all difficult at best. Many Democrats believe that if Biden loses Michigan, the most plausible alternative for him is to win both Arizona and Nevada, which have a combined 17 votes. Georgia or North Carolina, each with 16 votes, could also substitute for Michigan, but both now lean solidly toward Trump. After Michigan, or the combination of Arizona and Nevada, “there’s a fault line where the math works but the probabilities are pretty significantly lower,” Sosnik said.

Public polls this spring aren’t much better for Biden in Arizona and Nevada than in Georgia and North Carolina. And just as Biden faces erosion with Black voters in the Southeast, he’s underperforming among Latinos in the Southwest. Yet most Democrats are more optimistic about their chances in the Southwest than the Southeast.

In Nevada, that’s partly because the Democrats’ turnout machinery, which includes the powerful Culinary Union Local 226, has established a formidable record of winning close races. Both states have also been big winners in the private-investment boom flowing from the three big bills Biden passed in his first two years in office: Nevada received $9 billion in clean-energy investments, and Arizona got a whopping $64 billion from semiconductor manufacturers. The sweep of Trump’s plans for the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants could undo some of his gains with Latinos.

But mostly, Democratic hopes in both states center on abortion. Ballot initiatives inscribing abortion rights into the state constitution seem on track to qualify for the ballot in both, and polls show most voters in each state believe abortion should remain legal in all or most cases. In Arizona, the issue has been inflamed by the recent decision from the Republican-controlled state supreme court to reinstate a near-total ban on abortion dating back to 1864.

Beychok says a message of defending democracy and personal freedoms, including access to abortion and other reproductive care, remains Biden’s best asset across the Sun Belt and Rust Belt swing states. “Abortion, democracy, and freedom have been greater than whatever Republicans have decided to throw against the wall,” he told me. “They can go and scream about Biden’s age, or ‘the squad,’ or inflation and the cost of things. The problem is they have been singing that song for years and they have continued to lose elections.”

If Biden has a path to a second term, those issues will likely need to clear the way again—in the Rust Belt and Sun Belt alike.

From the 1970s through the 2000s, Marjorie Perloff and Helen Vendler were regularly mentioned together as America’s leading interpreters of poetry. When a 2000 article in Poets & Writers referred jokingly to a “Vendler-Perloff standoff,” Perloff objected to the habitual comparison. “Helen Vendler and I have extraordinarily different views on contemporary poetry and different critical methodologies, but we are assumed to be affiliated because we are both women critics of a certain age in a male-dominated field,” she wrote in 1999.

Now fate has paired them again: Perloff’s death in late March, at age 92, was followed last week by Vendler’s at age 90. Both remained active to the very end: Perloff wrote the introduction to a new edition of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, published this year, and the current issue of the journal Liberties includes an essay by Vendler on war and PTSD in poetry. But for many poets and readers of poetry, the loss of these towering scholars and critics feels like the definitive end of an era that has been slowly passing for years. In our more populist time, when poetry has won big new audiences by becoming more accessible and more engaged with issues of identity, Vendler and Perloff look like either remote elitists or the last champions of aesthetic complexity, depending on your point of view.

Age and gender may have played a role in their frequent pairing, as Perloff suspected, but it was their different outlooks as critics that made them such perfect foils. They stood for opposite ways of thinking about the art of poetry—how to write it, how to read it, what kind of meaning and pleasure to expect from it.

Vendler was a traditionalist, championing poets who communicated intimate thoughts and emotions in beautiful, complex language. As a scholar, she focused on clarifying the mechanics of that artistry. Her magnum opus, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, is a feat of “close reading,” examining the 154 poems word by word to wring every drop of meaning from them. In analyzing “Sonnet 23,” for instance, she highlights the 11 appearances of the letter l in the last six lines, arguing that these “liquid repeated” letters are “signs of passion.”

For Vendler, poetic form was not just a display of virtuosity, but a way of making language more meaningful. As she wrote in the introduction to her anthology Poems, Poets, Poetry (named for the popular introductory class she taught for many years at Harvard), the lyric poem is “the most intimate of genres,” whose purpose is to let us “into the innermost chamber of another person’s mind.” To achieve that kind of intimacy, the best poets use all the resources of language—not just the meaning of words, but their sounds, rhythms, patterns, and etymological connections.

Perloff, by contrast, championed poetry that defied the very notion of communication. She was drawn to the avant-garde tradition in modernist literature, which she described in her book Radical Artifice as “eccentric in its syntax, obscure in its language, and mathematical rather than musical in its form.” She found this kind of spiky intelligence in John Ashbery, John Cage, and the late-20th-century school known as Language poetry, which drew attention to the artificiality of language by using it in strange and nonsensical ways. One of her favorite poets was Charles Bernstein, whose poem “A Test of Poetry” begins:

What do you mean by rashes of ash? Is industry

systematic work, assiduous activity, or ownership
of factories? Is ripple agitate lightly? Are
we tossed in tune when we write poems?

For Perloff, the difficulty of this kind of poem had a political edge. At a time when television and advertising were making words smooth and empty, she argued that poets had a moral duty to resist by using language disruptively, forcing readers to sit up and pay attention. “Poetic discourse,” she wrote, “defines itself as that which can violate the system.”

For Vendlerites, Perloff’s approach to poetry could seem excessively theoretical and intellectual; for Perloffians, Vendler’s taste could seem too conventional. (Perloff wrote that when her “poet friends … really want to put me down, they say that I’m not so different from Helen Vendler!”) Vendler’s scholarly books explored canonical poets such as Wallace Stevens, W. B. Yeats, and Robert Lowell; Perloff’s focused on edgier figures such as Gertrude Stein and the French Oulipo group, which experimented with artificial constraints on writing, such as avoiding the letter e. When it came to living poets, Vendler’s favorites tended to win literary prizes—Pulitzers, National Book Awards, and in the case of her friend and colleague Seamus Heaney, the Nobel. Perloff’s seldom did, finding admiration inside the academy instead.

These differences in taste can be seen as a reflection of the critics’ very different backgrounds. Vendler was born in Boston and attended Catholic schools and a Catholic college before earning a doctorate from Harvard. She went on to teach for 20 years at Boston University and then returned to Harvard as a star faculty member. She spoke about the open sexism she initially encountered in the Ivy League, but she was a product of that milieu and eventually triumphed in it.

Perloff was born to a Jewish family in Vienna and came to New York in 1938 as a 6-year-old refugee from Nazism. (In her memoir, The Vienna Paradox, she wrote that she exchanged her original name, Gabrielle, for Marjorie because she thought it sounded more American.) She earned her Ph.D. from Catholic University, in Washington, D.C., and spent most of her academic career in California, at the opposite corner of the country from the Ivy League and its traditions. Perloff’s understanding of high art as a tool for disrupting mass culture unites her with thinkers of the Frankfurt School such as Theodor Adorno—German Jewish émigrés of an older generation, many of whom also ended up in California.

In his poem “Little Gidding,” written during World War II, T. S. Eliot wrote that the Cavaliers and Puritans who fought in England’s Civil War, in the 17th century, now “are folded in a single party.” The same already seems true of Vendler and Perloff. Today college students are fleeing humanities majors, and English departments are desperately trying to lure them back by promoting the ephemera of pop culture as worthy subjects of study. (Vendler’s own Harvard English department has been getting a great deal of attention for offering a class on Taylor Swift.) Both Vendler and Perloff, by contrast, rejected the idea that poetry had to earn its place in the curriculum, or in the culture at large, by being “relevant.” Nor did it have to be defended on the grounds that it makes us more virtuous citizens or more employable technicians of reading and writing.

Rather, they believed that studying poetry was valuable in and of itself. In her 2004 Jefferson Lecture for the National Endowment for the Humanities, Vendler argued that art, not history or theory, should be the center of a humanistic education, because “artworks embody the individuality that fades into insignificance in the massive canvas of history.” Perloff made a similar argument in her 1999 essay “In Defense of Poetry,” where she criticized the dominance of cultural studies in academia and called for “making the arts, rather than history, the umbrella of choice” in studying the humanities.

There are no obvious heirs to Vendler and Perloff in American poetry today. Given the trend lines for the humanities, it seems unlikely we will see a similar conjunction of scholarly authority and critical discernment anytime soon. But that is all the more reason for them to be remembered—together, for all their differences—as examples of how literary criticism, when practiced as a true vocation, can be one of the most exciting expressions of the life of the mind.

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A new abortion ban in Florida has providers scrambling—and pregnant women reassessing their options. But the law has implications well beyond the Sunshine State. More after these four new stories from The Atlantic:

Trump’s contempt knows no bounds. How Daniel Radcliffe outran Harry Potter Those who teach free speech need to practice it, Will Creeley argues. Are white women better now?

Losing an Access Point

After two years of reporting on abortion for The Atlantic, I’ve noticed that providers and clinic administrators are usually pretty eager to talk with me. They’re happy to help demystify their work, or to explain how they’re responding to new developments in the legal system.

Not this week. Over the past two days, when I’ve reached out to providers and clinic staff across Florida, almost none of them had time for an interview. They were far too busy, they told me via email or harried phone call, treating and triaging an overwhelming number of patients trying to obtain an abortion before tomorrow’s new six-week cutoff takes effect.

Florida clinics have plastered warnings about the new ban across their websites for a while now: By May 1, in accordance with state law, abortions after six weeks will be prohibited, with exceptions included for rape and incest (which, in practice, are not often granted). Until now, abortions under 15 weeks have been legal in Florida, and since the fall of Roe v. Wade, the state has served as a kind of haven for women seeking the procedure from nearby states with stricter laws. More than 9,000 people traveled to Florida to obtain an abortion in 2023, and the proportion of Florida abortions provided to out-of-state patients increased from 5 percent in 2020 to 11 percent in 2023, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization focused on advancing reproductive rights.

Florida was “the beacon of access for all of the Southeast,” said Daniela Martins, who leads case management for the Women’s Emergency Network, a Florida-based abortion fund, and who called me in between working with two pregnant patients. In recent weeks, Florida providers have been working weekends and late nights to perform as many abortions for as many patients as possible before tonight’s midnight cutoff. “We’ve seen people elsewhere going without essential health care, bleeding in ERs, and we are fully aware that’s going to be Florida soon,” Martins said.

Until now, Martins’s job has involved helping women obtain abortions in Florida; for a typical patient, her organization will cover the cost of an abortion procedure (typically $600–700), as well as an Uber ride to the provider’s office. Now Florida patients seeking abortions will need to travel as far as Virginia; Maryland; Washington, D.C.; or New York for an abortion. North Carolina, although geographically closer to Florida, Martins said, requires a three-day waiting period in between appointments, and she doesn’t recommend that patients go there. On top of paying for an abortion procedure, Florida patients will now have to come up with money for airfare or gas, as well as a hotel; they’ll need to take time off work; and they might have to find someone to watch their kids for a few days. (Although, realistically, many women who might otherwise have obtained an abortion will not be financially or physically able to travel to have the procedure—which is, of course, the purpose of bans like these.) “It’s now going to cost three times more,” Martins said. “For every three people we could help before, now we can only help one.”

The Florida ban won’t just affect Floridians. Pregnant women who are seeking abortions all over the South no longer have Florida as an access point, which means that providers in abortion-friendly states, including Virginia, Illinois, and New York, will face a crush of new patients. Since the fall of Roe, many of these clinics have tried to anticipate this moment by moving to bigger clinics, hiring more staff, and expanding hours.

“We are expecting a huge influx of patients,” Karolina Ogorek, the administrative director of the Bristol Women’s Health clinic in southern Virginia on the border with North Carolina and Tennessee, told me. She’s hired a new nurse practitioner and set up contracts with two more physicians, expanded the clinic’s schedule to include Saturday and sometimes Sunday hours, and created a new landing page on their website to help out-of-state patients find financial support. She’s not anxious about the coming wave of patients because her clinic has faced a similar situation before, when South Carolina passed its own six-week abortion ban last year. “We are outraged,” Ogorek said. “But there is also a sense of calm. We say, ‘Okay, let’s do this again.’”

Florida’s abortion-rights advocates still have hope: A November ballot measure could, if it passes, protect abortion access in the state. And some Democrats, including the president, now view this fairly red state as a potentially winnable one for the first time in years; they’re hopeful that the issue will bring voters to the ballot box. “We’ve got staff on the ground; you’ve seen our investments begin to pop up in the state of Florida,” Joe Biden’s campaign communications director, Michael Tyler, told reporters last week. “It is one of many pathways that we have to 270 electoral votes, and we’re going to take it very, very seriously.”

But my Atlantic colleague Ron Brownstein doesn’t think a Biden victory in Florida seems especially likely, ballot measure or no. “The more likely scenario is that [Democrats] have to worry about Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin,” he told me, and “that they don’t have money—or, more importantly, time—to really give much attention to Florida.”

Related:

A plan to outlaw abortion everywhere The abortion underground is preparing for the end of Roe v. Wade (From 2022)

Today’s News

The judge in Donald Trump’s hush-money criminal trial held the former president in contempt and fined him $9,000 for repeatedly violating a gag order. The judge also warned Trump that he could face jail time if he continues making attacks on jurors and witnesses. The DEA is planning to reclassify marijuana as a less dangerous drug, according to the Associated Press. The proposal would not legalize marijuana on the federal level for recreational use. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to carry on with the planned offensive in Rafah, a city in southern Gaza, “with or without” a hostage deal with Hamas.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

What I Wish Someone Had Told Me 30 Years Ago

By Jim VandeHei

In 1990, I was among the most unremarkable, underachieving, unimpressive 19-year-olds you could have stumbled across. Stoned more often than studying, I drank copious amounts of beer, smoked Camels, delivered pizza. My workouts consisted of dragging my ass out of bed and sprinting to class—usually late and unprepared …

Then I stumbled into a pair of passions: journalism and politics. Suddenly I had an intense interest in two new-to-me things that, for reasons I cannot fully explain, came naturally …

Thirty years later, I am running Axios, and fanatical about health and self-discipline. My marriage is strong. My kids and family seem to like me. I still enjoy beer, and tequila, and gin, and bourbon. But I feel that I have my act together more often than not—at least enough to write what I wish someone had written for me 30 years ago, a straightforward guide to tackling the challenges of life.

Read the full article.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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