Swing states, the Electoral College, and the final push for votes in the US election

With the US election just under a week away, the final days of campaigning by Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump are well under way. What remains of their time and money is being funneled into so-called ?‘swing states’, which vary from election to election and in 2024 are North Carolina, Georgia, Wisconsin, Nevada, Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. But what is a swing state? Why does it matter how one state votes compared to the others? It all comes down to the Electoral College, a political process abandoned around the world except for the United States.

The Electoral College is a process built into the US Constitution. The Founders feared what they referred to as ‘tyranny of the majority’ in which the position of the majority would hold sway over the minority and would therefore diminish the strength of an individual’s vote. While candidates and Americans alike often refer to the US as a democracy, in theory and in practice the US is a republic. The legislative branch of the US government consists of a House of Representatives, in which states have a certain number of elected members based on the population of their state, and a Senate, in which each state has two members regardless of the size of the state they represent. The hope was that this would balance representation in government and has rarely been challenged over the course of the past 250 years.

When it came to selecting a President, the Founders aimed to create a similar system in which the interests of smaller states were not overrun by those of larger states. But because the President would be directly elected by individual vote – or at least that was the idea – a structure was introduced called the Electoral College. Each state has a certain number of electoral votes made up of two (to represent the Senators) and then the number of Representatives the state has based on its population size. This means that states do not have an equal number of electors, and these votes are subject to changes in the most recent census. Only the District of Columbia has a set number of electors each year; it is allocated as many electors as if it were a state with two senators but no more than the least populous state. Wyoming is the least populous state and only has three electors, and therefore D.C. does as well.

The Electoral College is made up of 538 electors. This number is based on the 100 senators and 435 representatives, plus three from D.C. California has the most electors (54) and the six smallest states have three each (North Dakota, South Dakota, Alaska, Delaware, Vermont, and Wyoming). Electors cast their votes based on the percentage of votes collected by a candidate from the general population; whichever candidate has more votes when all are counted receives all of the state’s electoral votes.

When it comes to determining which are swing states, campaigns use polling data to deduce which states’ electoral votes are up for grabs. Plenty of states have voted for a Democratic or Republican candidate for decades and their vote is unlikely to change, but shifting demographics and unpredictable voting patterns mean that some states, like Michigan or Pennsylvania, cannot be predicted as easily. Therefore, candidates make educated guesses about which states they are most likely to win and then will focus on winning the electoral votes of states whose outcome is unpredictable.

Overall, it’s a game of mathematics. A candidate must secure 270 electoral votes to win the election. Plenty of states are considered write-offs and their outcomes already essentially guaranteed, but others are still up in the air, so it comes down to the smaller states and winning their votes to reach that 270 minimum. This is why it does not matter who wins the nationwide popular vote; this happened in the case of Hillary Clinton, who won more votes in 2016 by 2.1% but lost to Donald Trump, who won 304 of the 538 electoral votes. Criticism of the Electoral College system has been gaining strength over the past two decades as the Founders’ system that was created with the intention of protecting the minority from the majority is now seemingly doing exactly the opposite: giving smaller states more representation and in turn giving their votes more weight than the majority of the population.

On the whole, the Founders were right to worry about the balance of power, majority versus minority, and representative politics, though they couldn’t have predicted the way the American population would eventually spread itself out across a land as big as the US. But presidential candidates are now required to cater more to states whose votes are up for grabs rather than making a concerted effort to appeal across the board. Polling itself is often inconsistent and unreliable in a country of 350 million people, and campaigning in swing states is a political gamble no matter what the data shows. While polls might show preference for one candidate generally, the Electoral College is far more difficult to predict and the results increasingly at likely to be at variance with the popular vote.