For the vast majority of Americans who live outside the seven battleground states, there is a confounding helplessness in 2024.
On the one hand, polling suggests a historically tight race heading into Election Day.
On the other hand, the Electoral College map suggests that the results in all but those seven states are a foregone conclusion, assuming people show up and vote the way polling suggests they will.
Every vote counts, obviously, but some seem to matter more than others. At least in some years.
Swing today, safe tomorrow
If there is some consolation for the millions of Republicans in California and Democrats in Texas – and so on – it is that today’s swing state is tomorrow’s safe state.
Missouri, for example, is a flyover state for presidential candidates today, reliably red and far off the radar of campaigns popping back and forth between actual battlegrounds.
But for about 100 years, Missouri was the ultimate bellwether in presidential elections, voting for the winner in 25 of 26 elections between 1904 and 2004 – within the lifetime of most of today’s voters.
Florida and Ohio, both of which are now red states for presidential purposes, were hotly contested battlegrounds until this election cycle. Virginia and Colorado, which were battlegrounds in roughly the same era, are now essentially blue in presidential years.
In the closest possible election that people alive today can remember, 2000, it’s Florida’s “hanging chads” and the US Supreme Court decision that ended a recount there that stick in people’s minds. But New Hampshire and New Mexico, now both blue states, were also decided by the smallest of margins.
Battlegrounds for about a generation
The point is that the people and politics of this country are constantly churning and moving. The makeup of the battlegrounds seems immutable in a single election, but battlegrounds have a shelf life, and it might only last about a generation.
I talked to David Schultz, a political science professor at Hamline University and author of the book, “Presidential Swing States,” which will be due for its fourth edition after the 2024 presidential election.
Swing, battleground and competitive are different things
Schultz told me that while we use terms like “swing state” and “battleground state” interchangeably, they’re actually different things.
A swing state is one that has actually flipped and recently supported presidents from different parties. Think of the “blue wall” states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan. They swing from Democratic President Barack Obama in 2012 to Republican President Donald Trump in 2016 and then back to Democratic President Joe Biden in 2020.
Now they’re battleground states, or places where candidates show up and campaign.
They also fall into a third category of competitive states, where results are within 5 percentage points.
“In many cases, a swing state is really all three. It’s a battleground state. It’s been flipped. It’s competitive. But in some cases, there are states that have not flipped yet,” he argued.
More technically, according to Schultz, these states usually share some characteristics, including that they are relatively evenly split between Republicans and Democrats and that their “average or median voter is to the right of where the Democrats are nationally and to the left of where the Republican Party is nationally.”
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