I bet everyone reading this knows well enough by now that the winner of the popular vote for president can lose the election. Twice this century, the loser of the popular vote became president thanks to the arcane institution of the Electoral College. With population increasing in urban and coastal areas and decreasing in rural areas, this institution has created more political power in fewer people than even the framers anticipated. Without reform, there is an increasing chance that the winner of the popular vote could regularly lose the presidency in the future.1
For 2024, however, we are stuck with it. And we have to think about the election in terms of what is the best path to an Electoral College majority (270 electoral votes).2 For this reason, we need to consider what are the most plausible swing states. These are the states that are genuinely up for grabs and together contain enough electoral votes to make a difference in the outcome. In 2020, it was generally accepted that there were seven clear swing states:3 Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, Minnesota, and Nevada. Biden won every state except North Carolina, and that one was a close loss.
Swing states don’t have to be big. Even small states can make a difference in a close election. For instance, New Hampshire had four electoral votes in the 2000 election (it still does in 2024). If New Hampshire had voted for Democrat Al Gore, he would have been elected president. Florida’s votes – all 25 of them – would not have mattered. Since 2000, New Hampshire has been a solid Democratic state in presidential elections. This year’s New Hampshire is likely Nevada.
Assuming Biden can hold his other 2020 states, the road to the White House will likely be decided in either the former Blue Wall states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania or the Sun Belt states of North Carolina, Georgia, and Arizona. Nevada is needed in either scenario to put Biden over the top. At the moment, all of these states are considered Toss-Ups except for North Carolina. The Tarheel State is leaning GOP, but there have been reports the Biden campaign thinks it has a shot there. It does, and at some point it is likely North Carolina will start reliably, but narrowly (at first, for sure), voting for Democratic presidential candidates. However, there is no reason to believe that this will be the year for that to begin. We can say the same of Texas, and there is reason to believe that the demographic shifts in that state might make Biden competitive this year but it just might not be the best use of limited campaign resources.4
While spending resources in North Carolina might be a reasonable gamble, doing so in Texas is not. Democrats should focus on winning the Senate race in the Lonestar State. That actually could be competitive. They probably won’t, however, because they need to keep Montana and Ohio, which are heavy lifts. The Democrats have already reportedly given up on Florida – which I think might be a mistake considering what an absolute mess the state has become under Gov. Ron DeSantis’ self-interested-politics-over-good-policy administration. In any case, the mistakes of 2016 are instructive here.
If you’ve followed me for a while, you might be familiar with hearing me say that “campaigns matter.” Related to this is the idea that if you watch what campaigns do rather than what they say, you’ll learn a lot about what’s going on. Campaigns will talk a lot of bullshit, especially if they are losing. (Whenever you hear someone say, “the only poll that matters is the one on election day” you can rest assured they think they are losing.) They will crow about their internal polling numbers and talk about how receptive voters are to their message. But where you learn what’s really going is how they spend their resources. If a presidential campaign starts spending in a state you wouldn’t expect them to win, then maybe they know they have enough states locked up to win. Well, normally that’s true but then we all saw how badly the Clinton campaign screwed up eight years ago.
We know now that for the last few weeks of the 2016 campaign, Clinton did no polling in Wisconsin or Michigan and ignored the states altogether despite pleas from Democrats and union activists on the ground in those states. (There was some attention given to Pennsylvania during this time.) Then, Clinton started campaigning in Arizona, which until 2018 was a reliably Republican state. The campaign even said it was expanding the map. At the time, that told me (and others) that Clinton was doing even better than the national polling showed – and that the state polling the campaign was doing showed she had the 270 electoral votes she needed. In the end, the campaign was either arrogant, incompetent, or just too optimistic and it turned out to be one whose resource allocation was not, in the end, done rationally.
This is important caveat going forward. We might think – or hope – that this was a function of a single poorly-run campaign, but all of the established politicos in the Democratic Party were involved in that campaign in one way or another. It shouldn’t have happened, but it did. And it makes me uneasy just saying that the Biden folks know what they are doing in North Carolina. So, we’ll have to see how it goes. I think the easier path to 270 for the president is the Blue Wall plus Nevada. In that scenario, I also see Arizona voting for Biden.
Keep an eye on where Biden focuses his attention on. That should tells us a lot about where his campaign thinks they have a real chance at winning. But also keep in mind the Clinton experience. Just because Biden ran a better campaign in 2020 doesn’t mean he will this time.
Polling Note: There is some much better news in the polling for Biden than there was for Clinton in 2016. The field has been once again flooded with lousy polling so far this cycle, but there are some excellent pollsters putting out surveys at this stage. In those polls, Biden is doing better than you have probably heard in the media. But the results are still all over the place. But there is one thing that Biden appears to have going for him that in the end lost Clinton the election: the “double-haters” are breaking for Biden. The term is unfortunate because I am not sure there are many people who “hate” Joe Biden who aren’t already in the tank for Trump, but it refers to voters who don’t want to vote for either candidate for whatever reason. These voters broke for Reagan 1980 and for Trump in 2016. It made the difference in both elections. But this year, when pushed so far these voters are breaking for Biden by double-digits. The presence of up to three or four well-known minor party candidates on the ballot could disrupt this, although at the end of the day it’s highly unlikely that voters who break to these minor candidates would have voted for president at all if they only had the two major party choices available.
The biggest problem is not that it is arcane; it’s that it’s part of the Constitution. And it’s nearly impossible to amend the Constitution – having only happened 17 times outside of the Bill of Rights, which should more appropriately be considered part of the original charter. Three of the amendments took a civil war to pass and two others just cancelled themselves out (Prohibition). There are other ways to address the problems of the Electoral College, such as the multi-state compact awarding all electoral votes in those states to the winner of the popular vote nationally even if that person loses in a particular state or by simply enlarging the membership of the House of Representatives so that a state’s relative population is more accurately reflected in its electoral vote count.
Not that the possibility of an EC tie is not zero and for that reason, voters should be even more focused on winning House seats. An EC tie (in fact, any EC vote in which no one gets a majority) is decided in the House, with each state delegation getting a single vote in the process. Therefore, it is not only important to win a majority in the House, but a majority of House delegations. It is not true that the current House will make the decision. A new Congress will be sworn in right after January 1, 2025. The certification of the EC vote does not take place until January 6, 2025. Even though if there is a tie, it would be known by December 16, 2024 – that vote is not confirmed until Congress meets on January 6th. Legally, there is no certified election result (for president and vice president) until that time. So, if Congress certifies the vote on January 6th as a tie, only then does the House take up the matter to decide the presidency (the Senate does the same for the vice presidency – and this could be important as well if the House vote itself is tied – another possibility in a 50-vote contest.
Sometimes the term battleground state is used rather than swing state. In fact, I tend to use that myself. However, it is easier to understand the difference between types of battleground states if we use swing state and battleground state. In this terminology, “battleground” more literally; that is, a state in which the parties are going to battle it out – usually with money. In 2020, Florida, Iowa, New Hampshire, Ohio, and Texas were among these kinds of battleground states. This is one reason some folks use the term “swing state” to refer to the battleground states up for grabs.
Of course, if Texas goes for the Democrat there is no way the Republican can win. It would be as if California or New York and New Jersey supported the Republican candidate. When Texas does turn Democratic – and that day is coming – even the Electoral College will not be able to save the GOP. Of course, by the time that happens there could be other political shifts that shake-up the national political calculus.