Memorable World History/Authors

How Swing States Work

In American politics, the term swingstate (or battleground state) refers to any state that couldreasonably be won by either the Democratic or Republican presidentialcandidate by a swing in votes. These states are usually targeted byboth major-party campaigns, especially in competitive elections. Meanwhile, the states that regularly lean to a single party are knownas safe states, as it is generally assumed that one candidate has abase of support from which they can draw a sufficient share of theelectorate.

Due to the winner-take-all style of theElectoral College, candidates often campaign only in competitivestates, which is why a select group of states frequently receives amajority of the advertisements and partisan media. The battlegroundsmay change in certain election cycles, and may be reflected inoverall polling, demographics, and the ideological appeal of thenominees. Election analytics website FiveThirtyEight identifies thestates of Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, NewHampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, andWisconsin as "perennial" swing states that haveregularly seen close contests over the last few presidentialcampaigns.

Background

In American presidential elections,each state is free to decide the method by which its electors to theElectoral College will be chosen. To increase its voting power in theElectoral College system, every state, with the exceptions of Maineand Nebraska, has adopted a winner-take-all system, where thecandidate who wins the most popular votes in a state wins all of thatstate's electoral votes. The expectation was that the candidateswould look after the interests of the states with the most electoralvotes. However, in practice, most voters tend not to change partyallegiance from one election to the next, leading presidentialcandidates to concentrate their limited time and resourcescampaigning in those states that they believe they can swing towardsthem or stop states from swinging away from them, and not to spendtime or resources in states they expect to win or lose. Because ofthe electoral system, the campaigns are less concerned withincreasing a candidate's national popular vote, tending instead toconcentrate on the popular vote only in those states which willprovide the electoral votes it needs to win the election, and it isfar from unheard of for a candidate to secure sufficient electoralvotes while not having won the national popular vote.

From recent past electoral results, aRepublican candidate can expect to easily win most of the mountainstates and Great Plains, such as Idaho, Wyoming, the Dakotas,Montana, Utah, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Nebraska, most of the South,including Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas,Tennessee and South Carolina, as well as Alaska. A Democrat usuallytakes the Mid-Atlantic states, including New York, New Jersey,Maryland and Delaware, along with New England, particularly Vermont,Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, the West Coast statesof California, Oregon and Washington, along with Hawaii.

However, states that consistently votefor one party at the presidential level occasionally elect a governorof the opposite party; this is currently the case in Massachusetts,Maryland, and Vermont, which all have Republican governors, as wellas in Louisiana, Kentucky, Kansas, and Montana, which currently haveDemocratic governors. Even in presidential election years, voters maysplit presidential and gubernatorial tickets. In 2016, this occurredin Vermont and New Hampshire, which elected Republican governors evenas Hillary Clinton won both states, while Montana and West Virginiaelected Democratic governors despite also voting for Donald Trump.

In Maine and Nebraska, theapportionment of electoral votes parallels that for Senators andCongressional Representatives. Two electoral votes go to the personwho wins a plurality in the state, and a candidate gets oneadditional electoral vote for each Congressional District in whichthey receive a plurality. Both of these states have relatively fewelectoral votes – a total of 4 and 5, respectively. Neither Maine,which is generally considered a Democratic-leaning state, norNebraska, typically thought to be safely Republican, would becomebattlegrounds in the event of a close national race. Despite theirrules, only once has each state 'split' its electoral votes – in2008, when Nebraska gave 4 votes to Republican John McCain, and oneto Democrat Barack Obama; and in 2016, when one of Maine'scongressional districts was won by Donald Trump, and the otherdistrict and the state itself were won by Hillary Clinton.