We have now reached a point in our political system where a few thousand voters in a handful of states control the presidency.
Why do swing states have so much influence?
The simple answer is the electoral college has created a system that gives a small number of states an outsized amount of power.
Because 48/50 states use a system of winner-take-all when it comes to the electoral college, whoever wins the popular vote in that state wins all of that state’s electoral votes, and the rest of the votes are literally discarded. Yes, that means that if Candidate A gets 50.1% of the vote, and Candidate B gets 49.9%, everyone who voted for Candidate B has their votes thrown out in the electoral college process.
If you’re a Republican in California, or a Democrat in Alabama, it’s easy to get discouraged and feel like your presidential vote doesn’t count.
So how does the electoral college lead to swing states?
Nearly the entire country falls into the blue or red category (remember Red=Republican, Blue=Democrat). Today, presidential candidates have a fairly predictable set of states they are likely to win. People who follow politics know that it’s quite likely Massachusetts will give all of their electoral votes to Kamala Harris, while Iowa will give all of theirs to Donald Trump. At present, the map of “safe” states for each candidate looks something like this:
A swing state (also sometimes called a battleground state) is a state that isn’t a lock for one party or the other — those are in gray on the map.
In this model you see Kamala Harris is predicted to carry enough blue states to get her to 226 electoral votes, while Donald Trump is predicted to win the red states, putting him at 219.
Neither candidate can win with *only* red or blue states, because they need to get to 270 electoral votes to win. So the key is pulling in a combination of swing states, in order to hit 270. electoral votes.
This year there are seven swing states that are up for grabs: Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Michigan.
So if you’re Harris, you’re looking at these swing states, and you’re trying to figure out what combination will get you the 44 electoral votes needed to hit 270.
Trump needs 51 total. Both candidates are mapping strategies to victory that run straight through these seven states.
Because of the electoral college, nearly all of a candidate’s time and attention goes to these battlegrounds, while issues that are important to “safe” states are often deprioritized.
How does a state become a swing state?
A swing state gets that label mostly based on recent voting trends and current polling numbers.
In Arizona, for example, Joe Biden won in 2020 by a tiny margin of only about 10,500 votes. That was just .03% of the state’s total votes. Current polls in the state show Harris and Trump are in a dead heat there. Those two factors make it a swing state this year. Who shows up to vote will make it or break it in a state like Arizona.
But it’s important to remember that things can change from year to year.
Virginia, for example, voted Republican for decades. In 2008, the state backed President Obama, and has gone for the Democratic candidate every election since then.
Changing voting patterns reflect a changing electorate. And Virginia’s population has grown by nearly 40% over the past thirty years. Much of that population has been in the Washington, DC suburbs – what was once huge swaths of farmland is now suburban sprawl. The DC suburbs tend to be well off and well educated, with large proportions of residents whose families of origin are from other countries. Their perspectives on politics often differ widely from that of a Southern farmer.
One history professor, Charles Poland, who has lived in the DC suburbs for 40 years, says that the changes to the region came, “like a tidal wave.”
Economic changes can drive voting shifts too. Ohio was once the ultimate swing state. Pollsters said for decades that, “as goes Ohio, so too goes the Oval Office,” but now Ohio is considered safely a Republican win for the presidency.
Political scientists pin this on Ohio’s industrial and manufacturing economic bases, which have been hard hit over the past decade. Trump’s “America First” messaging has been extremely effective in mobilizing voters in Northeast Ohio who perhaps might have not been particularly engaged in the political process before.
How can the issue of swing states be changed?
While Ohio and Virginia are now more in the safe red and blue categories, the seven remaining battleground states are going to see a firehose of election attention over the next eight weeks.
These tiny fractions of voters hold a tremendous amount of power over the entire country. There are three ways we can think about changing this:
1. A Constitutional amendment to move to the popular vote instead of using the electoral college.
2. A change in each state (this would just require passing a bill in each state) to change how their electoral college votes are assigned, and moving to a proportional system, rather than winner-take-all.
3, The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which is an agreement between states that will go into effect when enough states have signed on. The NPVIC says that, “Whoever wins the popular vote nationwide will get our state’s electoral votes.” This would help ensure that the winner of the popular vote wins the election without needing to amend the constitution.
People in swing states: tell us about your experiences with presidential elections. Do you like the extra attention? Are you exhausted by it?