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InUnited States politics, aswing state (also known asbattleground state,toss-up state, orpurple state) is any state that could reasonably be won by either theDemocratic orRepublican candidate in a statewide election, most often referring topresidential elections, by aswing in votes. These states are usually targeted by bothmajor-party campaigns, especially in competitive elections.[1] Meanwhile, the states that regularly lean to a single party are known as "safe states" (or more specifically as"red states" and "blue states" depending on the partisan leaning), as it is generally assumed that one candidate has a base of support from which a sufficient share of the electorate can be drawn without significant investment or effort by the campaign. In the2024 United States presidential election, seven states were widely considered to be the crucial swing states:Arizona,Georgia,Michigan,Nevada,North Carolina,Pennsylvania, andWisconsin.[2][3]
Due to thewinner-take-all method that most states use to determine theirpresidential electors, candidates often campaign only in competitive states, which is why a select group of states frequently receives a majority of the advertisements and candidate visits.[4] The battlegrounds may change in certainelection cycles and may be reflected in overall polling, demographics, and theideological appeal of the nominees.
InUnited States presidential elections, each state is free to decide the method by which its electors to theElectoral College will be chosen. To increase itsvoting power in the Electoral College system, every state, with the exceptions ofMaine andNebraska, has adopted awinner-take-all system, where the candidate who wins the most popular votes in a state wins all of that state's electoral votes.[5]
The expectation was that the candidates would look after the interests of the states with the most electoral votes. However, in practice, most voters tend not to change party allegiance from one election to the next, leading presidential candidates to concentrate their limited time and resources campaigning in those states that they believe they canswing towards them or stop states from swinging away from them, and not to spend time or resources in states they expect to win or lose.
Because of the electoral system, the campaigns are less concerned with increasing a candidate's national popular vote, tending instead to concentrate on the popular vote only in those states which will provide the electoral votes it needs to win the election, as many successful candidates havelost the popular vote but won the electoral college.
In past electoral results, Republican candidates would have expected to easily win most of themountain states andGreat Plains, such asIdaho,Wyoming,the Dakotas,Montana,Utah,Kansas,Oklahoma, andNebraska, most of theSouth, includingAlabama,Mississippi,Louisiana,Arkansas,Tennessee,Kentucky,South Carolina,Missouri,Texas, andWest Virginia, as well asAlaska. Democrats usually take theMid-Atlantic states, includingNew York,New Jersey,Maryland,Virginia, andDelaware,New England, particularlyVermont,Massachusetts,Rhode Island, andConnecticut, theWest Coast states ofCalifornia,Oregon,Washington,Hawaii, and theSouthwestern states ofColorado andNew Mexico, as well as theGreat Lakes states ofIllinois andMinnesota.[6][7]
However, some states that consistently vote for one party at the presidential level occasionally elect a governor of the opposite party; this is currently the case inVermont andVirginia which have Republican governors, as well as inKentucky andKansas, which currently have Democratic governors. Even in presidential election years, voters may split presidential andgubernatorial tickets. In 2024, this occurred in three states:North Carolina,Vermont andNew Hampshire. Vermont and New Hampshire both elected Republican governors even as DemocratKamala Harris won both states. North Carolina, despite voting for RepublicanDonald Trump, elected a Democratic governor. North Carolina has elected a Democratic governor in each concurrent gubernatorial election where Donald Trump was the Republican presidential nominee, by a notably wide margin in2024.[8]
In Maine and Nebraska, the apportionment of electoral votes parallels that forU.S. senators andrepresentatives. Two electoral votes go to the candidate who wins the plurality of the vote statewide, and a candidate gets an additional electoral vote for eachcongressional district in which they receive a plurality.[5] Both of these states have relatively few electoral votes – a total of 4 and 5, respectively. Nebraska has split its votes since 1992, and Maine has done so since 1972. Each state has split its electoral votes only thrice since implementation: all three times Maine's second district gave one vote to Donald Trump, in 2016, 2020 and 2024; while Obama in 2008, Biden in 2020, and Harris in 2024 obtained the Nebraska's second district vote in their respective races.[5][9]
States where the election has a close result become less meaningful in landslide elections. Instead, states which vote similarly to the national vote proportions are more likely to appear as the closest states. For example, the states in the1984 election with the tightest results wereMinnesota andMassachusetts. A campaign strategy centered on them, however, would not have been meaningful in theElectoral College, asDemocratic nomineeWalter Mondale required victories in many more states than Massachusetts, and RepublicanRonald Reagan still would have won by alarge margin.[10] Instead, thetipping-point state that year wasMichigan, as it gave Reagan the decisive electoral vote. The difference in Michigan was nineteen percentage points, quite similar to Reagan's national margin of eighteen percent.[10] Michigan would have been more relevant to the election results had the election been closer.
Similarly,Barack Obama's narrow victory inIndiana in the2008 election inaccurately portrays its status as a battleground. Obama lost Indiana by more than ten percentage points in the closer2012 election, but triumphed anyway as Indiana's electoral votes were not directly needed for a coalition of 270 votes; the same scenario was withMissouri, whereJohn McCain narrowly won by 4,000 votes in the2008 election, but was won byMitt Romney by nearly 10 points in2012 election, indicating its GOP trend. Other lightly Republican leaning states such asNorth Carolina andArizona were more plausible Democratic pick-ups in 2012.[11]
In 2012, the states of North Carolina, Florida,Ohio, andVirginia were decided by a margin of less than five percent. However, none of them were considered the tipping-point state, as Romney would not have been able to defeat Obama even if he had emerged victorious in all of them. Virginia was most in-step with the rest of the country. Virginians voted for Obama by just under 4 points, almost the exact same as the nation.[11] Had the election come out closer, Romney's path to victory would probably have involved also winningWisconsin,Nevada,New Hampshire, orIowa, as these states had comparable margins to Colorado, and had been battlegrounds during the election.
As many mathematical analysts have noted, however, the state voting in a fashion most similar to that of the nation as a whole is not necessarily the tipping-point.[12] For example, if a candidate wins only a few states but does so by a wide margin, while the other candidate's victories are much closer, the popular vote would likely favor the former.[13][14] However, although the vast majority of the states leaned to the latter candidate in comparison to the entire country, many of them would end up having voted for the loser in greater numbers than did the tipping-point state.[15] The presidential election in 2016 was a notable example, as it featured one of the largest historical disparities between theElectoral College and popular vote.[16][17]
Additionally, this "split" in votes was much larger in both directions than in previous elections, such as the2000 election.[18] In that election, Vice PresidentAl Gore won the popular vote by less than 1 percent, while incoming presidentGeorge W. Bush won the Electoral College by only 5 votes.[18] In contrast, 2016 Democratic nomineeHillary Clinton won the popular vote by over 2 percentage points.[19][20] This meant that Donald Trump would have picked upNew Hampshire,Nevada, andMinnesota if the popular vote had been tied, assuming a uniform shift among the battleground states.[21][22] On the other hand, Clinton would have had to win the popular vote by at least 3 points to win theElectoral College, as Trump, theRepublican nominee, won the tipping-point state ofWisconsin by less than 1 percent.[23]
In 2020, Joe Biden won the popular vote by over 4 percentage points but won the tipping point state of Pennsylvania by only 1 percent. This shows Donald Trump could win the election even if he lost the popular vote by over 3 percent and would have picked up Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin with a uniform shift among the states.
In 2024, Donald Trump won the popular vote by a narrow margin of 1.5%, while winning the tipping point state of Pennsylvania by a similarly narrow margin of 1.7% percent. This is evidence of an erosion of the popular vote advantage that Democratic candidates have typically enjoyed in recent elections, likely spurred by a significant narrowing of margins in safe blue states such as New York, New Jersey, and Illinois, which each saw dramatic shifts toward the Republican candidate, as well as dramatic increases in the Republican support in moderately red states such as Florida and Texas compared to previous cycles.
Swing states have generally changed over time. For instance, the swing states ofOhio,Connecticut,Indiana,New Jersey and New York were key to the outcome of the1888 election.[24] Likewise,Illinois[25] andTexas were key to the outcome of the1960 election, Florida andNew Hampshire were key in deciding the2000 election, and Ohio was important during the2004 election. Ohio has gained its reputation as a regular swing state after 1980,[26][27] and did not vote against the winner between 1960 and 2020.[28] In the2024 election, Ohio and Florida had shifted rightward and were considered safe wins for Republicans.[29][30]
In fact, only three people have won the presidential election without winning Ohio since 1900:Franklin D. Roosevelt,John F. Kennedy, andJoe Biden. Areas considered battlegrounds in the2020 election were Arizona, Florida, Georgia,[31] Iowa,Maine's 2nd congressional district, Michigan,Minnesota,Nebraska's 2nd congressional district, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania,Texas and Wisconsin,[32] with Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin constituting the "Big Five" most likely to decide the Electoral College.[33] In the end, Joe Biden won Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, NE-02, Nevada, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, whileDonald Trump won ME-02, Florida, Iowa, North Carolina, Ohio and Texas.
Campaign strategies are not universal in swing states. Statistical analytics websiteFiveThirtyEight notes that some swing states, such asNew Hampshire, swing because they have many moderate, independent swing voters, and campaigning puts an emphasis on persuading voters. Contrasting this isGeorgia, which is a swing state because it has large populations of Republican-leaning evangelical whites and Democratic-leaning Black voters and urban college-educated professionals, thus campaigns often concentrate on voter turnout.[34]
Presidential campaigns and pundits seek to keep track of the shifting electoral landscape. While swing states in past elections can be determined simply by looking at how close the vote was in each state, determining states likely to be swing states in future elections requires estimation and projection based on previous election results, opinion polling, political trends, recent developments since the previous election, and any strengths or weaknesses of the particular candidate involved. The swing-state "map" transforms between each election cycle, depending on the candidates and their policies, sometimes dramatically and sometimes subtly.
For example, in the2016 election, Hillary Clinton overperformed in educated, suburban states such as Colorado and Virginia compared to past Democratic candidates, while Donald Trump performed above standard Republican expectations in theRust Belt, such as Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. In addition, gradual shifts can occur within states due to changes in demography, geography, or population patterns. For example, many currentlyRepublican states, likeArkansas,Missouri,Tennessee, andWest Virginia, had been battlegrounds as recently as 2004.[35]
According to a pre-election 2016 analysis, the thirteen most competitive states wereWisconsin,Pennsylvania,New Hampshire,Minnesota,Arizona,Georgia,Virginia,Florida,Michigan,Nevada,Colorado,North Carolina, andMaine.Nebraska's 2nd congressional district was (and is still as of 2024) also considered competitive.[1] However, this projection was not specific to any particularelection cycle, and assumed similar levels of support for bothparties.[36]
Ten weeks before the 2020 presidential election, statistical analytics websiteFiveThirtyEight noted that the electoral map is "undergoing a series of changes", with some states moving rightward, other states moving leftward, and two states (Florida, until the 2020 election, andNorth Carolina) described as "perennial" swing states.[37][38] Likewise, an analysis of results of the 2018 midterms indicated that the "battleground states" are changing, withColorado andOhio becoming less competitive and more Democratic and Republican, respectively, whileGeorgia andArizona were slowly turning into swing states.[39][40][41]
The Electoral College encourages political campaigners to focus most of their efforts on courting voters in swing states. States in which polling shows no clear favorite are usually targeted at a higher rate with campaign visits, television advertising, andget out the vote efforts by party organizers and debates. According to Katrina vanden Heuvel, a journalist forThe Nation, "four out of five" voters in the national election are "absolutely ignored".[42]
Since most states use awinner-takes-all arrangement, in which the candidate with the most votes in that state receives all of the state's electoral votes, there is a clear incentive to focus almost exclusively on only a few undecided states. In contrast, many states with large populations such as California, Texas and New York have in recent elections been considered "safe" for a particular party, and therefore not a priority for campaign visits and money. Meanwhile, twelve of the thirteen smallest states are thought of as safe for either party – only New Hampshire is regularly a swing state.[43] Additionally, campaigns stopped mounting nationwide electoral efforts in the last few months near/at the ends of the blowout 2008 election, but rather targeted only a handful of battlegrounds.[43]
This is a chart of swing states using the methodology ofNate Silver for determining tipping point states, but including the other states in close contention in recent elections, ranked by margin of victory.[44] In this method, states and DC are ordered by margin of victory, then tabulating which states were required to get to 270+ electoral votes in margin order. The tipping point state, and the next 10 states with close margins on each side, are shown as the swing states in retrospect, along with the "bias" which is the difference between the final margin in the tipping point state and final popular vote margin. This takes into account inherent electoral college advantages; for example, Michigan was the closest state in 2016 by result, and Nevada was the closest state to the national popular vote result, but the tipping points that most mattered for assembling a 270 electoral vote coalition were Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.[44]
Electoral college defenders offer a range of arguments, from the openly anti-democratic (direct election equals mob rule), to the nostalgic (we've always done it this way), to the opportunistic (your little state will be ignored! More vote-counting means more controversies! The Electoral College protects hurricane victims!). But none of those arguments overcome this one: One person, one vote.