Shifting States, also known as Battleground States or Purple States, are highly competitive states that have historically switched between voting for different parties in presidential elections. While most states consistently vote along party lines – from 2000 to 2016, 38 states voted for the same political party – the few that do not receive disproportionate attention from candidates and pollsters. Here is the story of the swing states and the powerful influence they had on elections in America.
Electoral college empowers states
The founding fathers were divided over how to choose a president. Some wanted Congress to choose the leader of the nation, while others wanted citizens to vote directly. The Electoral College was created as a compromise. The Constitution assigns each state a number of voters based on the combined total of the state’s delegates to the Senate and the House of Representatives. There are 538 electoral college votes in total, and presidential candidates need 270 electoral votes to win the White House. Forty-eight out of 50 states have an “winners” system, which means that whoever wins the popular vote wins all the votes of the electoral colleges in that state. Two states – Maine and Nebraska – use the Congressional District method, which means they award two electoral votes to the popular vote winner in the state and one electoral vote to the popular vote winner in each Congressional district. .
Presidents can win the popular vote and lose the electoral college vote. This has happened five times, most recently in the 2016 election, when Hillary Rodham Clinton received 2.8 million popular votes as Electoral College winner Donald Trump, the biggest disparity in history.
Given that 38 of the 50 states have voted for the same party since the 2000 presidential election, it’s relatively easy to predict which states will vote for a Democratic candidate and which will vote for a Republican. It’s the states that don’t consistently vote along party lines that determine whether a candidate wins or loses: Swing states.
Have there always been Swing States?
WATCH: America 101: What is a Swing State?
There is a reason why swing states exist in the United States: the American electoral system is structured around states. As John Hudak, a senior fellow at the Brooklings Institution, explains, “Our presidential election system is designed to make states the important jurisdictional unit in voting.
Hudak attributes the highly competitive 1800 presidential election between Aaron Burr and Thomas Jefferson as heightened political interest in winning specific states.
“After 1800, states began to take a tough approach to ensure their numbers were both collected and reported. Over time, politicians learned what state ridings looked like, and that competitiveness increased as well, ”says Hudak.
David Schultz, editor-in-chief of Presidential swing states: why only ten questions with Stacey Hunter Hecht, says that swing states really began to emerge as a result of the Civil War. “In 1860, it was the issue of slavery that created swing states like Ohio,” says Schulz. He explains that the Republican Party had been founded a few years earlier in Wisconsin and that it was taking off in the Midwest. The party became known for supporting abolition and maintaining the union of the Union.
“The northern states vote for Lincoln. The southern states vote for the Democratic candidate. It was states like Ohio that tipped the scales,” he said. “No Republican has won the presidency unless they won Ohio,” Schultz says.
While the concept is almost as old as that of the electoral college, the term “swing state” is a relatively modern creation, first used by the New York Times in 1936 while Franklin D. Roosevelt campaigned in the West. This only gained momentum in the hotly contested 2000 election, when journalists covered battlefield states like Florida with growing fervor.
Why are the Swing States important?
President Harry Truman holds up a premature copy of the Chicago Daily Tribune declaring his defeat to Thomas Dewey in the presidential election, St. Louis, Missouri, November 1948.
Bettmann Archives / Getty Images
The claim that “every vote counts” is especially true in swing states. Tight presidential elections throughout American history have confirmed this: Harry S. Truman defeated Thomas Dewey in 1948 by winning less than one percent of the popular vote in then-states like Ohio, California, Indiana, Illinois and New York – a race so close that headlines mistakenly proclaimed Dewey the winner.
In the 1960 presidential election between Richard M. Nixon and John F. Kennedy, 10 states were won by less than 2% of the vote. And in 2000, the election results went to who won Florida, which George W. Bush claimed by a margin of just 537 votes.
The high-stakes game of Victory Over Swing States means candidates are spending 75% or more of their campaign budget on wooing them. Candidates almost exclusively visit swing states on the election track, often skipping other states altogether unless they are fundraising. “Swing states are the presidential campaign, ”says Hudak.
What dynamics create states of swing?
There are three main factors that can create swing states, and they often overlap and are all in play.
1. Population changes. Urban areas tend to vote Democrats and rural areas tend to be Republican. When citizens move from liberal-leaning coasts or large cities to smaller towns or more rural areas, they can shift the balance between parties.
2. Ideological polarization: The Pew Research Center found that the ideological divide between the parties began to widen in the 2000s. “Before the 1990s, there were a good number of liberal Republicans in the north and conservative Democrats in the south,” said Hudak. “As parties divide, they can change whether a state is a swing state or not.
3. Moderate policy: In a state with more moderate voters, the divide between Republicans and Democrats is narrowing, making it more difficult to determine political results. Hudak says states like Maine and New Hampshire “have a lot of moderate, independent-minded voters … who drive this bipartisan competitiveness.”
Hudak adds that as the country has evolved, the number and identity of swing states have also evolved. “The Voting Rights Act had a huge impact on the empowerment of African Americans who couldn’t vote 50 years ago in countries like Texas, North Carolina and Georgia,” says Schultz.
Swing States in the 2020 elections
In the 2016 election, Donald J. Trump claimed a constituency victory by winning six of the ten most competitive swing states.
Potential 2020 Battlefield States in the Presidential Election between Joe Biden and Donald J. Trump include Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
