The swing states of today are the safe states of tomorrow

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For the vast majority of Americans living outside the seven battleground states, 2024 is bewildering helplessness.

On the one hand, polls point to a historically close race heading into Election Day.

On the other hand, the Electoral College map suggests that the results in all but these seven states are a foregone conclusion, assuming people show up and vote the way the polls suggest.

Of course every vote counts, but some seem to be more important than others. At least in some years.

If there is any consolation for the millions of Republicans in California and Democrats in Texas – and so on – it is that today's swing state is tomorrow's safe state.

Missouri, for example, is now a flyover state for presidential candidates, reliably red and well off the radar of campaigns bouncing back and forth between actual battlegrounds.

But for about 100 years, Missouri was the deciding factor in presidential elections, voting for the winner in 25 of 26 elections between 1904 and 2004 – within the lifetimes of most current voters.

Until this election cycle, Florida and Ohio, both now red states for presidential elections, were hotly contested battlegrounds. Virginia and Colorado, which were battlegrounds around the same time, are now essentially blue in presidential years.

In the most similar election anyone alive can remember, the year 2000, it is the hanging buggers in Florida and the U.S. Supreme Court decision ending a recount there that stick in people's minds . But New Hampshire and New Mexico, now both blue states, were also decided by narrow majorities.

The point is that the people and politics of this country are constantly in turmoil and flux. The composition of battlefields appears to be fixed in a single choice, but battlefields have a shelf life, perhaps only a generation or so.

I spoke with David Schultz, professor of political science at Hamline University and author of the book “Presidential Swing States,” the fourth edition of which will be published after the 2024 presidential election.

Swing, Battleground and Competitive are different things

Schultz told me that while we use terms like “swing state” and “battleground state” interchangeably, they are actually different things.

A swing state is a state that has actually flipped and recently supported presidents of different parties. Consider the “blue wall” states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan. They range from Democratic President Barack Obama in 2012 to Republican President Donald Trump in 2016 and then back to Democratic President Joe Biden in 2020.

Now they are battleground states, or places where candidates show up and campaign.

They also fall into a third category of competitive states where results are within 5 percentage points.

“In many cases, a swing state actually includes all three. It is a battleground state. It was turned around. It's competitive. But in some cases there are states that have not yet turned around,” he argued.

Technically, Schultz said, these states tend to have a few characteristics in common, including that they are relatively evenly split between Republicans and Democrats and that “their average or median electorate is to the right of the Democrats' position nationally and to the left of the position.” the Democrats are national.” The Republican Party is national.”

This is roughly where the Rust Belt states, collectively known as the “Blue Wall,” are currently located.

They had voted for the Democrats in a bloc in every election from 1992 until Trump's victory in 2016. In 2020, they leaned toward the Democrats again and, according to many political strategists, represent the Democrats' best chance of keeping the White House, even if the long-term demographic trend is unlikely to be so favorable for the Democrats there in the long term. The parties are increasingly divided by education and race.

If there's a single lead state this year, Schultz believes it's Pennsylvania.

Republicans find themselves in a situation similar to that in Sun Belt states like Georgia and North Carolina, which are seeing population growth among young people and people of color.

Schultz argued that some states have seen up to a 20% change in the composition of their populations since the last election, as the Covid-19 pandemic has led to deaths as well as internal migration and enfranchisement of new voters.

This means that the country's population has changed significantly since some states were last changed.

In the 1988 election, the last time the Blue Wall did not vote together, Pennsylvania and Michigan voted with the loser, Democrat Michael Dukakis. In many ways, this election marked the end of an era. This was the last election in which California, the most populous state, voted for a Republican president, George HW Bush.

Meanwhile, Texas, the second most populous state, has not elected a Democrat since Jimmy Carter won the White House in 1976, although results there were fairly close in 1992 and 1996, when Clinton won the White House.

Schultz said the country appears to be sorting itself into red and blue and the number of competitive states is shrinking.

“When a state gets a reputation for being Republican or Democratic, we start to see immigration patterns where people decide for themselves where they want to live,” he told me.

For years, Democrats have hoped that changing demographics would bring Texas back into play, which could completely reshape the electoral map. Schultz doesn't see such a change in Texas for another four or eight years.

However, he believes there are some states that could become new swing states in the coming years. He mentioned South Carolina and Montana, states that could change as more young people move to them and change their makeup.

If you look at all competitive states in all elections since 1976, Most states have evolved or been competitive in one direction or another over the last 50 years.

Sometimes momentum bypasses the competitive category entirely.

West Virginia is now one of the most reliably Republican states – when it flipped from Democrat to Republican in the 2000 election, it was a stark swing. The result placed it outside the “competitive” category.

In other years, almost the entire country reeled, such as 1984 – when the only state won by Democratic candidate Walter Mondale was Minnesota, his homeland, which he captured along with Washington, DC.