September 25, 2024
The National Constitution Center in Philadelphia during the debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald J. Trump this month. Graham Dickie/The New York Times
The four swing states that could matter most
By Jess Bidgood
The latest, with 41 days to go
Vice President Kamala Harris made a broad economic pitch in Pittsburgh, casting herself as a pro-business pragmatist.
*Threats to former President Donald Trump may prompt changes to his travel plans and event types, according to several people briefed on the matter.
* In a television interview, President Biden called Trump a “loser” who lacked “redeeming value.”
The 2024 presidential election is, according to where the polls stand right now, confoundingly close.
The most recent national New York Times/Siena College poll showed Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump tied, while our polling average shows Harris with a slim, two-percentage-point lead.
And each of the seven battleground states that will probably determine the outcome of the election is just about as narrowly divided — or even more so.
This meant that my mission for today was hard.
I wanted to bring you, my dear and busy readers, a slimmed-down list of states that can best help you understand the presidential election, hoping to home in on a combination of blue wall and Sun Belt battlegrounds that rise above the rest to tell the story of how this thing might go. When I got stuck, I called Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst, who said he, too, found the battlegrounds difficult to narrow down.
“Everything is so close,” he said, “that even though things are really stable, even the tiniest movement is sufficient to change the whole outcome.”
To put it another way: In this election, everything — and everywhere — matters. It’s a battle of inches, one in which whole states and key groups of voters are behaving a little differently than they have in the past, and that makes it hard to know where exactly the electoral tipping point will be. Both candidates are battling it out across the map.
But as Nate and I considered the polls, the size of each state and how large each looms in each candidate’s most obvious path to victory, we landed on four states that we think are worth watching extra closely. My colleagues across the newsroom will be covering them — and I’ll be heading to all of them myself before the election.
Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania
It’s the indomitable, indisputable and invulnerable king of the swing states: It’s Pennsylvania.
The biggest swing state, with 19 electoral votes, Pennsylvania is the only battleground widely seen as critical to each candidate’s most straightforward path to victory. It’s the state with the biggest spending on television and radio advertising: Groups supporting Trump and Harris have reserved more than $138 million in airtime in the state between today and Election Day, according to AdImpact (Michigan was next, at more than $82 million).
Pennsylvania is also the battleground state where both Trump and Harris have spent the most time. Since Harris entered the presidential race on July 21, she has held or attended public events in the state on nine different days; Trump has done so on at least eight days since the race was reset. (Those figures for both candidates include attending the Sept. 10 debate in Philadelphia and a Sept. 11 memorial in Shanksville, which was not a campaign event.)
Trump won Pennsylvania, and the presidency, in 2016. Biden did the same in 2020. Either candidate can get to 270 electoral votes without it — but their path to doing so will be complicated.
Wisconsin
Let’s talk about Harris’s clearest path to victory. In our polling average, she currently has two-percentage-point leads in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin — and if she wins all three, and a single electoral vote from Nebraska, the presidency is hers, assuming the less narrowly divided states vote as expected.
That makes Wisconsin and its 10 electoral votes critical for Harris, who has campaigned in the state three times since she became the Democratic nominee. But it’s also important for Trump, who could use it to make up ground if he loses Pennsylvania.In 2020, Wisconsin was considered the “tipping point” state that put Biden over the edge in the Electoral College, when he won there by fewer than 21,000 votes. The state is shaping up to be another nail-biter, with Democrats and Republicans alike skeptical of Harris’s polling edge in the perennially close state.
Michigan is critical, too, though it has a recent history of friendliness to Democrats, who performed well there in the 2022 midterms and in the 2020 election.”You think of Wisconsin as maybe right up there, next to Pennsylvania, as one of Trump’s best chances to break the Harris path,” Nate told me.
North Carolina
Trump’s advisers believe his path to victory runs through Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Georgia. Yet North Carolina is, as Nate put it, a place where the polls have been “shockingly” good for Harris.
A Democratic presidential candidate hasn’t won North Carolina since Barack Obama did in 2008, but according to our polling average, Trump’s lead is less than one percentage point, and it’s unclear how a scandal involving Mark Robinson, the Republican gubernatorial candidate Trump endorsed, might shape his fortune there. Trump’s campaign appears to be watching the state closely: He has spent at least six days campaigning there since Harris entered the race, more than any state aside from Pennsylvania.
With 16 electoral votes, North Carolina is a major prize that could help Harris offset a loss in Pennsylvania, and it’s a place she and other Democrats are working furiously to contest.
Georgia
For Trump, Georgia is all-but-must-win. It’s a state that went narrowly for Biden in 2020; now, according to our polling average, it’s Trump’s best state of all seven battlegrounds.
Nate pointed out that Georgia also helps illustrate an important and surprising dynamic in the 2024 election: It is whiter states, like Michigan and Wisconsin, where Harris appears to be polling stronger, while more diverse states are leaning slightly Trump’s way.
But that’s not the end of the story. The Harris campaign is hoping that a surge of turnout from her supporters in and around Atlanta as well as more rural parts of the state could hand the state to her. She has spent four days campaigning there since announcing her candidacy, while Trump has been only there twice.
And beyond
In choosing these four states, I have left off two other important battlegrounds: Arizona, which has 11 electoral votes, and Nevada, which has six.
Both candidates are taking these states seriously — Harris, for example, will be campaigning in Arizona on Friday and Nevada on Sunday — but given their smaller sizes and the paths I’ve laid out above, these two states seem less likely to be determinative.
If we knew the outcome of the race in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, North Carolina and Georgia, Nate told me, we’d have a pretty good chance of predicting the outcome of the election. “The Arizona and Nevada picture would only come back into play under a relatively narrow set of circumstances,” he said.
Arizona and Nevada will both tell us a lot, though, and we’ll be watching them closely. So will states like California and New York, reliably blue states that could determine control of the House of Representatives. So, really, we can’t take our eyes off anywhere.
— Ama Sarpomaa contributed reporting.
A bus emblazoned with Ms. Harris’s campaign slogan in Philadelphia earlier this month. Graham Dickie/The New York Times
How is political advertising affecting you?
It’s autumn! The season of falling leaves, Halloween costumes and — this year — wall-to-wall political advertising.
I want to know how this is affecting your life. What’s happening in your mailbox? What’s it like to watch TV? How has that shaped your daily routine? And where else are you getting information about the election?
I’d especially like to hear from readers who live in swing states.
Let me know here, and I may use your answer in an upcoming story or newsletter.
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