The Battleground States That Will Decide 2024
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The Battleground States That Will Decide 2024
An early look at where the presidential election will be fought and won.
On Friday, when I went to hit send on my article at 5:55 pm, I realized that publishing a newsletter late on Friday afternoon might not be the best idea. So I’m considering shaking up what days and times I post.
Before I did that, though, I wanted to check in with you. I’ve put two poll questions at the bottom of this article asking which days and times you’d like to get this newsletter. Please answer them and help me make my decision!
— Seth
On to today’s article…
Joe Biden announced last week that he’s running for reelection. With the president now officially in the race, it’s a good time to preview the landscape of the 2024 Electoral College map. This post is meant to be a broad look at the electoral landscape to help you get your bearings. Over the next 18 months, I plan to get a lot more in the weeds. For now, though, I’ll stick with the big picture.
In 2020, Joe Biden won the Electoral College (EC) with 306 votes to Donald Trump’s 232.
After the 2020 Census, electoral votes were reapportioned according to the new population tallies. The map below shows which states gained and which lost EC votes.
If you apply these changes to the 2020 map, Biden’s margin shrinks by 6 EC votes, and he beats Trump 303 to 235.
The best way to look at the 2024 election is to use this last map as a baseline. When you do, you’ll see that the GOP nominee will need to pick up a minimum of 34 EC votes to tie the count at 369-369. So which states would the Republican nominee have to flip to get there?
The Battleground States
These were the states that Joe Biden most narrowly won in 2020, the number of EC votes they have, and the margin that Biden won by:
Georgia (16) — 0.2%
Arizona (11) — 0.3%
Wisconsin (10) — 0.6%
Pennsylvania (19) — 1.2%
Nevada (6) — 2.4%
Michigan (15) — 2.8%
Looking at this list, it’s clear that the fiercest battles will be over Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin. Trump won each of those states in 2016 and lost them by less than 1% in 2020. If the GOP nominee could flip all three back into their column, they would narrowly beat Biden 272 to 266.
What will make this challenging is that those three states are very different in terms of demographics and what message would appeal to the voters there. Wisconsin is very rural and heavily white. Arizona is dominated by the Phoenix suburbs and has a large Latino population. Finally, Georgia has both Atlanta — with its racially and financially diverse suburban and urban areas — and its rural regions. Regardless of who the GOP nominee is, they’ll have a real challenge winning over these states with their distinct demographics and divergent political preferences.
That is why the GOP nominee will almost certainly try to expand the battleground into Pennsylvania and Michigan. While these states have a long history of voting Democratic in presidential elections (both had gone blue every cycle from 1992 to 2012), Trump snapped that streak in 2016. These victories in Pennsylvania and Michigan, together with his win in next-door Wisconsin, is what won Trump the election in 2016.
The interesting thing about these three states is that they have a lot in common. Of course, there are nuances and differences between them, but they also have shared characteristics. They’re all Rust Belt states hit hard by deindustrialization. They all have a lot of white, non-college-educated voters. They all have older populations. The fact that they are so similar in composition explains why they swung uniformly for Trump in 2016 and then back to Biden in 2020.
In 2024, the GOP nominee could run a campaign targeting these states in hopes that they can kill three birds with one stone. Trump did this successfully in 2016 by running on an anti-trade, anti-immigrant, and anti-elite message. If the next GOP nominee does the same, there’s a chance they could win by flipping Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin even as they lose the Sun-Belt states of Georgia and Arizona. If that happens, the GOP nominee would beat Biden 279 to 259.
Personally, I do not think that Michigan and Pennsylvania will be decisive in the election. If the Republican nominee does manage to win them, they’ll most likely already have won Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin, making the Michigan and Pennsylvania victories icing on the Electoral College cake.
But presidential elections aren’t perfectly predictable. We won’t know which states will end up being decisive until the election actually happens. Because of that, both candidates will probably invest a lot of time and money in all of the states listed above. They’ll probably expand the battleground to other states, too, like North Carolina (which Trump won in 2020 by 1.4%) and maybe even Florida (which Trump won by 3.4%), although I think that competing in the latter would be a waste of money since it’s clearly trending towards the GOP.
But anyways, we don’t need to get too deep into the weeds here. I wanted mainly to set the table for future discussions about the presidential election and Electoral College.
The ultimate takeaway here is that the GOP nominee will need to flip a minimum of 34 EC votes in 2024 and that only a narrow set of states — Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada, and maybe North Carolina and Florida — will be in play.
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The Battleground States That Will Decide 2024
Will be fun and interesting to see how closely elections turned out to the possibilities you offered, thanks
Seth -
(Only place I can find to respond to your piece on working class voters. It's not just the Democrats.)
Center-left parties throughout the developed world have been losing working class voters by the droves. In the early 2000s I was shocked - when Labour voters voter Tory or BNP, when French workers voted for the National Front, or SDP voters in Sweden voted for the Swedish Democrats. But parties of the center-left no longer advocate for policies that benefit working class people.
And what's more, when they stop voting Dem, or Labour, of SDP - they are accused of being racist. I am reminded of the online wag Titania McGrath in the U.K. After the Corbyn debacle she wrote, "The obvious conclusion is... we didn’t call them racist often enough." But McGrath's creator, Andy Doyle, is gay and left-wing, not right-wing. Similarly, Bill Maher (who I don't particularly care for) did a shtick on Cracker Jacks made of shit and popcorn. where he says that if half of the voters prefer the shit over the popcorn, shouldn't the Dems be asking "Why?"
But the Democrats have no intention of asking, "Why?" Rents are utterly unaffordable - especially in blue state urban areas. Why? Where a single working-class income could support a family in 1960, two working-class incomes in 2020 cannot. Why? Two generations ago, flagship urban public schools were some of the best in the nation, but now urban public education is collapsing. Why?
The Democrats simply refuse to address these questions. Instead, they turn on the questioner. So, not surprisingly, those who question ultimately question the Democratic Party itself. Even when the GOP is a complete clown car. Or worse.
I have little hope for the Democratic Party.
And the Republican Party is completely beyond hope.
Not a good situation.
John Egan
Buffalo, WY