The Associated Press has a new report on how this debate is unfolding among Democrats right now. Here’s the essence of it:

Democrats’ best shot at the White House is to win back their old turf — the Rust Belt states heavy with working-class white voters who have become increasingly difficult to hold in the party’s tent. But the path to winning the Senate travels through what many believe is the Democrats’ territory of the future. College-educated suburbanites, young people and minorities make up the winning coalition in Arizona, Colorado, Georgia and North Carolina, the states where Democrats will need to pick up seats to wrest control of the Senate from the GOP. ... For Democrats wrestling with picking their nominee, it’s more than just a head-scratcher. Senate races and presidential races are linked — Senate candidates rarely win when their party’s presidential candidate loses their state. If the party wants to win the White House and the Senate, its best hope of rolling back Republican gains under President Donald Trump, it will need to select a candidate who can win in both types of places.

As the AP notes, the question some ask is whether to prioritize winning the Rust Belt first in a way that might make winning in the Sun Belt harder. But the fact that the route to control of the Senate runs through the Sun Belt states requires the Democrats to invest in both paths on the presidential level, as well.

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Obviously, the Democratic nominee is going to want a Democratic-controlled Senate, should he or she win the presidency, so that alone will mean trying to win in those states on the presidential level (though it might not mean spending time in, say, Georgia, which is a tough presidential lift, while North Carolina and Arizona look more gettable, Arizona perhaps somewhat less so).

But why is this a choice?

Whoever the Democratic nominee is, he or she is not going to neglect the Rust Belt states this time around, after what happened last time. After all, winning back the three “blue wall” states that Trump snatched — Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin — puts the Democrats on track to likely victory. And given that none of those Sun Belt states is even remotely a sure thing for a Democratic presidential candidate, he or she will likely have to win back at least Pennsylvania and Michigan to have a shot at winning the presidency.

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The Democratic nominee could likely win with those two but not Wisconsin by picking up, say, Arizona or North Carolina. But counting on either of those seems incredibly risky, so the Democrat simply can’t — and won’t — neglect Wisconsin, either. (Obviously, taking back Florida would probably seal the deal for the Democrat, but that is also going to be a pure toss-up.)

The flip side of this is that Democrats will also have to heavily contest Arizona and North Carolina, because Wisconsin is going to be a grueling battle and one of those will be the default if Dems lose it. In short, all will be aggressively contested.

It’s also not clear what this debate tells us about the demographics of the route to 270. The essence of the matter, as the AP article explains, is that the three key Rust Belt states are a combined 76 percent white, while the four relevant Sun Belt states — Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina and Texas — are a combined 49 percent white. That latter bloc of states tends to be younger and better educated as well, the AP notes.

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The implication of this is usually taken to be that, if Democrats want to prioritize the Rust Belt path, they should appeal primarily to blue-collar whites, while taking the Sun Belt route would mean appealing to young voters, minorities and more-educated whites.

But this only takes us so far. The Democratic candidate will want to boost turnout among minorities and young voters, and to try to capture a larger share of educated white suburban voters alienated by Trump, in the Rust Belt states, as well. Those voters do exist in the Rust Belt — in places such as Philadelphia, Detroit and Milwaukee, and their suburbs — and they are a critical piece of winning back the industrial Midwest, in addition to keeping Trump from running up enormous margins among non-college-educated whites.

Indeed, given that Trump will try to absolutely supercharge turnout among rural, aging, non-college-educated whites, this will require Democrats not to seriously prioritize one group or the other. They’ll have to do everything possible to keep Trump’s margins restrained among non-college-educated whites, while also maximizing turnout and vote share among the more cosmopolitan-oriented coalition of nonwhites, young voters and white suburbanites, especially women.

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All of which is to say that the “Rust Belt vs. Sun Belt” question isn’t really a proxy for the question of which demographic route the Democratic candidate should take.

It’s not really a proxy for the question of which type of candidate to pick, either, for the same reason. The premise of Joe Biden’s candidacy is that he’ll do best among non-college-educated whites. This isn’t even clear, because he’s less populist than Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders. But even if you accept this, the candidates often said to appeal to young voters, minorities and/or white suburbanites could argue that they are well-poised to take back the Rust Belt states for precisely that reason, while also putting the Sun Belt states in closer reach. (Warren and Sanders might also argue that their populism equips them to keep Trump’s margins lower among working-class whites, too.)

At bottom, this debate doesn’t really get us far. The Democratic nominee will have to fight everywhere, for all types of voters, no matter what. And because electability is a largely unknowable trait anyway, Democratic voters are better off picking the candidate whose ideas and persona — or, ideally, both — excites them most.