Seven states to decide who wins US election

Joe Biden waits to speak to supporters during a campaign stop in Phoenix, Arizona, this week. Picture: AFP

America is home to 336 million people across 50 states and the District of Columbia. Yet the 2024 presidential race will be decided by seven states with less than a fifth of the US population. These battlegrounds will get almost all the attention.

How most states will vote is ­already fairly certain. Political pros expect Donald Trump to take 24 states and 219 electoral votes; Joe Biden can likely count on 20 states and DC with 226 electoral votes. (This assumes the same outcome as in 2020 in the two states that award votes by congressional district – Trump carries Maine’s rural Second District and Biden Nebraska’s Omaha-area Second District.)

That leaves seven key states with 93 votes: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carol­ina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Trump carried all of them except Nevada in 2016. In 2020, he took North Carolina by 1.34 percentage points; Biden carried the other six by between 0.23 and 2.78. To prevail, Biden needs 45 of these states’ electoral votes; Trump, 51. Reaching either threshold will require winning at least three of the states.

Seven is fewer battlegrounds than we’ve had in recent elections. George W. Bush’s campaign in 2000, for which I was the strategist, fought in 21 battlegrounds and won 14. If Bush had lost only one state more, Al Gore would have won.

That the 2024 race has so few battlegrounds will have huge consequences for how the election plays out. Each candidate will concentrate his travel, organisation and hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising in those seven states. The only reasons for either to go to non-battleground states will be to raise money, sleep in his own bed, participate in ­debates (if they happen) or attend events with national impact – such as Ronald Reagan’s 1980 kick-off on the New Jersey seashore with the Statue of Liberty as his backdrop.

That there are so few battlegrounds will put more pressure on candidates to focus on issues specific to those seven states. In Michigan, they’ll talk about the auto industry; in Pennsylvania, natural gas production. In Nevada, candidates must explain their view on the Yucca Mountain ­nuclear-waste facility, while in Arizona, besides the border, water issues will matter.

So will the quality of Democrat and Republican parties in these states. This is a problem for the GOP. The Democrat parties range from good to very good. They’ll be generously bankrolled by the Biden campaign and Democratic National Committee. By contrast, the Arizona, Georgia and Nevada Republican parties are in shambles. Michigan’s GOP ousted its chairman in January after she bankrupted the party. Her replacement, former congressman and ambassador Pete Hoekstra, can pull it together, but it’s unclear how much money the Republican National Committee can give any state party.

Governors matter as well. They have political operations that recently carried their states and supporters they can mobilise. Georgia and Nevada have Republican governors; the other five states have Democrat ones. North Carolina’s Governor, Roy Cooper, is leaving office this year. What better way to advance his political career than by putting his state in Biden’s column?

These battlegrounds may be decided by whether Trump can grab more working-class Democrats and independents than Biden can flip suburban college-educated Republicans and independents. The proportion of college-educated voters in these states is around the national average. That’s a big reason they are so close.

People who don’t live in this handful of battlegrounds are fortunate. They’ll hear about political happenings from the news, but their televisions won’t be saturated with negative ads, their mailboxes stuffed with leaflets, their phones endlessly pinged, or their doorbells rung by campaigners.

A word of advice for families in battlegrounds: Unless you live in Pennsylvania’s Amish country, it’ll be difficult to escape. Consider turning off the TV between now and election day, or paying for the ad-free options on streaming services. Get your bills online. Don’t answer calls from unfamiliar numbers. Invest in speakers to play canine growling when anyone approaches the door.

Each vote everywhere counts, but the 61 million Americans living in the seven battlegrounds will decide who’s president. They can take some comfort knowing that as presidents come and go, states fall off the target list while others go on. But for this election – this long, expensive, vicious election-– they drew the short straw. It won’t be easy but their votes will be crucial, perhaps historic.

The Wall Street Journal

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