US election watch: Breaking down the battleground
For both candidates, securing the White House means winning 270 electoral college votes. How might they get there?
Welcome back to Bournbrook’s regular series on the state of the US presidential race, your impartial guide to the campaign and what you can expect as election date draws near.
With less than two months to go until November 3rd, we really are in the home stretch. Both candidates will soon be preparing for the first round of debates, scheduled for September 29th, while their campaigns ramp-up activity on the ground and on the airwaves. To keep up the pace with new developments, US Election Watch will, from now on, be reporting to you weekly.
After taking a detour to cover Senate races last week, it is time to take a deeper look at the electoral college, and the various paths both candidates have towards 270, the magic number of electoral votes required to secure the White House. But first...
The state of the race
Last week, I noted that, as far as the polls are concerned, this presidential election has proved remarkably stable. Indeed, as of this morning, Joe Biden leads Donald Trump by 7.6% in the FiveThirtyEight national polling average, virtually unchanged from last week. I am somewhat going to give the game away here, but, to quote one Twitter user, the overwhelming majority of this year’s election punditry is ‘finding new ways to say Biden is ahead, but the race isn’t over’.
The rather boring truth about election analysis is this: the candidate who leads in the polls usually but not always wins. To that effect, the person who was ahead at this point in the campaign has won eight out of the last eleven presidential elections.
In terms of state polling, the latest figures are mostly good news for Joe Biden. The Democrat has extended his lead in Pennsylvania, from 4.5% to 5.1% and in Michigan, from 6.6% to 7.7%. He also maintains a steady lead in Wisconsin, at 6.5%. Should Trump lose all three, and the rest of the map remains unchanged, Joe Biden will win the election. The president’s approval rating remains essentially where it was last week, at about 43%.
Defining the ‘Battleground’
Two popular terms which you have probably seen floating around, and which are often used interchangeably, are ‘battleground’ and ‘swing’ states. They are, however, not the same thing and we should make a clear distinction. ‘Swing’ states are those which tend to, well, ‘swing’ to either side between elections. ‘Battleground’ states, meanwhile, are those which happen to be competitive in a given election cycle.
The battleground will include traditional swing states, such as Florida, but may also contain those which have, until recently, leaned heavily towards one party, such as Texas or Minnesota. There are also historical swing states that, largely as a result of demographic change, are no longer that competitive on the presidential level, such as Virginia and Colorado.
With that disclaimer out of the way, what are the battleground states to watch in 2020? Naturally, considering there are no universally accepted criteria, it depends on who you ask. Regardless, here is what I think they are when considering current polling and historic trends:
Trump 2016
Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Maine 2nd District, Michigan, Nebraska 2nd District, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas and Wisconsin
Clinton 2016
Minnesota, Nevada and New Hampshire
There are a few things you may have noticed here. First, the vast majority of these states were won by Trump in 2016. This is to be expected, considering the president (who won 306 electoral votes to Hillary Clinton’s 232) is both playing defence and is substantially down in the polls. Second, two of these are not states at all. Maine and Nebraska allocate some of their electoral votes on the basis of congressional districts, two of which are competitive this year (unlike both states as a whole). While each district has only one electoral vote, there are scenarios where they could prove decisive.
Finally, this is a very broad map, at least by historical standards. The reason for this is that, while Donald Trump remains competitive in the so-called ‘rust-belt’, Joe Biden is significantly overperforming Clinton (and, indeed, Obama) in the ‘sun-belt’, with a number of traditionally Republican states potentially set to vote blue for the first time in twenty years (or, in the case of Texas, over forty years).
The road to 270
Given the president’s current standing in the polls, Donald Trump’s path to victory is narrow but relatively clear. While the 306 electoral votes Trump secured in 2016 did not constitute a blowout, they do give him some room for error. What follows are a few plausible scenarios.
Sidenote: All of the maps you are about to see were created using 270towin.com. While I cannot cover every possibility, I do recommend you play around with their interactive tool yourself.
If the election is to be again decided in the rust-belt, with the rest of the map remaining static, Trump only has to hold one of either Michigan, Pennsylvania or Wisconsin.
Trump avoids a rust-belt rout
There is also Minnesota, a state which Clinton carried by a mere 1.5%. The Trump campaign has spent a lot of time and resources there this year and for good reason. It constitutes among the most likely states to swing into the Republican column come November. If the president succeeds there, he can safely lose all three of the above battlegrounds. That being said, the latest polls still give Joe Biden a healthy lead.
Minnesota to the rescue
There are two more Clinton 2016 states which remain competitive, Nevada and New Hampshire. The latter is a state which Trump lost by less than half a percentage point four years ago. While the latest polls there show a clear Biden lead, it is comparable to other North Eastern battlegrounds. New Hampshire has also shifted to the right in every election since 2004, so a Trump upset here is not to be discounted. The president lost Nevada by a more substantial 2.4%, but it is far from safe for Biden. Specifically, Biden’s apparent weakness among the state’s Latino population, traditionally a bedrock of Democratic support, may spell trouble.
Nevada is arguably the most under-polled state of any 2020 battleground, with only a single survey conducted there all summer. That poll showed a modest Biden lead of 5%. A recent New York Times/Siena College poll has Trump down only 4%. With an economy which heavily relies on tourism, it has also been among the worst hit by the coronavirus. While Trump’s handling of the pandemic remains poor in the eyes of most voters, it remains to be seen whether his focus on re-opening the country might close the gap in the Silver State. Nevada and New Hampshire have only six and four electoral votes respectively, so Trump will have to win them both in order to offset a rust-belt rout.
The above scenarios do, however, rely on the president holding his ground in the rest of the country, which brings us to the numerous path open to his opponent…
The most obvious path towards a Biden victory relies on succeeding where Hillary Clinton failed and re-taking the trio of traditionally blue states in the North East. As noted above, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin are enough to put a Democrat in the White House.
The trio comes home
Failing a decisive breakthrough in the rust-belt, Biden’s relative strength in the South, including a host of historic Republican strongholds, opens up a number of opportunities. First, we have Florida, the perennial swing state. While some states have shifted Democrat, such as Arizona, Virginia and Texas, and some have shifted Republican, such as Pennsylvania, New Hampshire and Minnesota, the Sunshine State remained ultra-competitive for at least two decades. In fact, it has gone with the overall winner of every presidential election since 1996.
Without Florida, Trump’s path to 270 electoral votes becomes extremely narrow. For Biden, we may call this the Florida plus one strategy. Assuming he wins there, any one of the battleground states not coloured in below is enough to put him over the top.
Florida plus one
Joe Biden can still win without Florida, but the race then becomes much more competitive. His remaining paths mostly rely on winning a mix of rust-best and sun-belt states. Biden could, for instance, carry Arizona, Michigan and Pennsylvania, or Georgia, North Carolina and Wisconsin. He could also lose all three of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin but pull out a sun-belt win with Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina.
How Biden can win with the sun-belt, even if Trump takes Florida, and keeps the rust-belt
There is always one more option, one which almost comes across as a joke. In this scenario, everything stays exactly the same since 2016, with the lone exemption of a Biden upset in Texas.
Texas decides
This is not a likely scenario, for one big reason. While Texas has become more Democratic in recent election cycles, and while the polls currently have it in a virtual tie, it still leans noticeably to the right of the country as a whole. Therefore, if Biden wins here, he has also probably already won Florida and Arizona, rendering the Lone Star State’s 38 electoral votes ultimately irrelevant towards the outcome.
In other words, the odds of Biden losing traditionally Democratic-leaning states such as Michigan and Pennsylvania, while also pulling out a win in what is still Republican-leaning Texas, are slim. Yet it remains far from impossible. Something which Texas Democrats love to tell you is that theirs is not so much a Republican state as it is a non-voting state. They may have a point. In 2016, voter turnout in Texas was the fifth-lowest in the country, at just over 51% (this is, however, only about 5% lower than the national average). The argument is that a considerable registration and mobilisation effort, particularly among young and Latino Texans, can put Biden over the top. It’s plausible, but I would not bet on it.
There is one final scenario we should consider, which is that no one wins. You may have noticed that 538, the total sum of electoral college votes, happens to be an even number. While it is very unlikely that both candidates end up on 269 electoral votes (for what it’s worth, FiveThirtyEight has the probability at under 1%), it is not impossible. Here is one example of such a map:
Biden wins Arizona, Michigan and Wisconsin. All else remains the same. The college is tied.
What happens in this scenario? The short answer is that Congress decides the election and Trump most likely remains in post. The slightly longer answer is that the House will choose the president and the Senate will choose the vice president. In the House vote, each state delegation would have one vote. While the Democrats control the House and are likely to hold it in November, the Republicans will still probably have majority representation in most states. As for the Senate, it is unlikely that Democrats will take control in the event their candidate loses at the top of the ticket. That being said, it isn’t that unlikely, and we could end up with Trump sharing the White House with a Democrat. For the sake of everyone’s sanity, I hope it doesn’t come to this.
Update: this article was amended at 1:25pm on 12/09/2020 to account for the recent NYT/Siena polls in Minnesota, New Hampshire, Nevada and Wisconsin.
