Will Be There Be Any Surprise Competitive States in 2024’s Presidential Election?
Close national elections do not always produce many state contest nail-biters
As a result of an even, and seemingly deep, partisan divide in this country, the U.S. is approaching its heyday for competitive presidential elections.
The popular vote in five of the last six cycles since 2000 (all but 2008) has been decided by less than five percentage points.
The only other time that has happened in U.S. history was during the six elections from the end of Reconstruction in 1876 through 1896 which were all decided by fewer than 4.3 points. [The popular vote in three of these (1880, 1884, 1888) was remarkably decided by less than one point].
Moreover, the popular vote victory margin in each of the last nine presidential elections since 1988 has been in the single digits – a record – averaging 4.7 points.
At first blush, one would expect that close elections beget a bevy of closely decided ‘battleground’ states.
That is not always the case – particularly as red states get redder and blue states get bluer.
For example, Barack Obama defeated Mitt Romney by just 3.3 percent in the popular vote in 2012, but the winning margin was less than five points in just four states (7.8 percent): Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, and Virginia.
That marked the fewest number (and percentage) of competitive states across the 30 presidential elections since 1828 in which the popular vote margin of victory was less than 10 percentage points. More than one in four states were decided by less than five points among these 30 single-digit popular vote contests (357 of 1,327, 26.9 percent).
Of course, the definition of what is a battleground (purple, swing) state in any given presidential election cycle is not an exact science.
Sometimes states receive the label based on the outcome of the previous election. For example, Georgia was decided by just 5.1 points in 2016 and was subsequently labeled a battleground in 2020; living up to its new status, Georgia was decided by just 0.2 points.
However, the partisan lean of a state can change quickly even between cycles and definitions of ‘battlegrounds’ are not always based on looking at what happened four years prior.
For example, Florida is not considered to be a battleground state in the 2024 cycle, even though Donald Trump won it by just 3.4 points four years ago. That may be due in part to the huge surge to the right witnessed during the 2022 midterms, in which the GOP won all five statewide elections on the ballot in Florida by more than 15 points.
But when an election becomes less competitive nationally, states that are normally decided without much fanfare can end up being close calls. Perhaps ‘blow-out battlegrounds’ would be the name for these de facto competitive states. Not a lot of attention is paid to these battlegrounds, in part because such status may be fleeting and also because there is little appetite for dwelling on which states were competitive when the national contest itself is a rout.
For example, in 1980, Ronald Reagan carried all but six states and the District of Columbia, but 16 states were won by less than five points. That is a larger number of ‘battlegrounds’ than in all but one of the subsequent 10 cycles (17 in 1992).
Reagan won a dozen of these close shaves (Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Kentucky, Maine, Massachusetts, Mississippi, New York, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Wisconsin) with President Jimmy Carter carrying only four of them (Hawaii, Maryland, Minnesota, West Virginia).
In 1944, Franklin Roosevelt won 432 of 531 Electoral College votes and defeated Thomas Dewey by 7.5 points, but 14 states saw the two candidates within less than five points of each other.
That ranks as the sixth highest number of states with victory margins tallying less than five points across the 26 cycles from 1920 through 2020.
And even though the 2020 election was a barn burner, in the end only eight states were won by Trump or Biden by less than five points: Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Nevada, Michigan, and Florida.
RealClear Politics has designated each of these states except for Florida as the “top battlegrounds” of the cycle.
However, if the partisan winds blow stronger behind the GOP this November, the question will be not only how many of these states fall off the battleground state list, but how many new states are folded into it?
The most likely candidates for that designation would be Minnesota, New Hampshire, Maine, and Virginia.
To be sure, if states like Minnesota and New Hampshire are either won by Trump or carried by Biden by just a couple of percentage points, then there is a very good chance many of the aforementioned battlegrounds from 2020 will be not be so competitively decided.
The same could also be said of states like Texas, Ohio, and Iowa if the cycle saw a Democrat surge, though few if any analysts are expecting anything of that sort to occur this November.
One additional factor in creating tight margins is the effectiveness of a third party or independent candidate. Robert Kennedy Jr. has frequently polled in the double-digits and if he sustains that level of support, the number of states decided by a handful of percentage points could increase.
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– 1980: Of the “close shave” states, only in the Yellowhammer State did Reagan manage to garner a greater number of votes than Carter and Independent contender John Bayard Anderson combined.
– “…3.3%…” I have been led to believe that BHO led now-departing Senator Romney by about 4 percentage points (51% to 47%) back then – which is still a tad narrower than the Democratic victory eight years later, chiefly due to the fact that the D ticket of 2012 managed to again snag electoral vote-rich FL and OH (by small margins, particularly the former) whereas the 2020 D ticket garnered more raw votes in CA and other dependably D-leaning large states while losing out in the aforementioned pair {more ‘efficient’ win in ’12; something analogous recently happened in the UK parliamentary election, in which the Labour Party led by Sir Keir Starmer actually attained fewer total votes this year than in the 2017 “snap” election – with the stridently leftish Jeremy Corbin as leader – but won far more seats, due to the so-called tactical voting and a sharp split within the rightist opposition parties, namely the Conservative & Unionist “Tory” party and the Reform (ex-UKIP) party}.
(Somewhat related to article) : J D Vance – born James David Bowman – is the MAGA party nominee for vice president.
– The Buckeye State has had three of its own *by birth* who became vice presidents: Charles Gates Dawes, elected with “Silent Cal” Coolidge in 1924; Charles Fairbanks, elected with TR in 1904; and Thomas Hendricks, elected with Grover Cleveland in 1884.
– By contrast, it has had four of its own *by residence* who won major party nominations for the position (but lost): George Pendleton, standing for election with George McClellan in 1864; Allen Thurman, standing with Grover Cleveland in 1888; Whitelaw Reid, standing with Benjamin Harrison in 1892; and John Bricker, standing with Tom Dewey in 1944.
– Should the ‘revenge & retribution’ ticket of DJT and JDV win, the latter would become the very first Ohioan *by residence* to also have been *elected* to the largely ceremonial position.
– 13:00 MN-05-CD Time: Joseph Robinette Biden (jr) announced he would stand down (i.e. not seek a second four-year term), thus bringing his very long political career – which began not with a federal office but a seat on the New Castle County Council – to a close!
– I for one hope there is an ‘open convention’ to determine his successor nominee; ‘Steel sharpens Steel’!
re: Vance and Biden
Vance is the first sitting or former U.S. senator to be picked as GOP vice-presidential nominee since Dan Quayle in 1988 and 1992. By contrast, every Democratic vice-presidential nominee from 1988 onward has been either the incumbent VP or a sitting U.S. senator [in fact this is true as far back as 1944 with two exceptions]. That streak will potentially end this year with Biden’s withdrawal; as of this writing several of the likely candidates on Kamala Harris’s speculated VP list are not U.S. senators. It would be quite amusing for the Democrats’ decades-long streak of picking a senator for VP and the Republicans’ decades-long streak of *not* picking a senator for VP to end in the same cycle.
Vance has the least service in elected office of any major-party vice-presidential nominee in modern times, with less than 2 years in the Senate. The most recent ones from each party with less service than Vance were Frank Knox in 1936 and Sargent Shriver in 1972; though each was politically active for decades, neither had any service in elected office [Knox served as chair of the Michigan GOP from 1910-12 and Shriver served in various appointed roles in Chicago and in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations].
Also anomalous (and a bit discourteous to their constituents, in my opinion) is for a VP nominee to be chosen when they are less than two years into their *current* office, though this is not without precedent:
*Richard Nixon: elected to the Senate in 1950, elected as VP in 1952
*Spiro Agnew: elected as governor of Maryland in 1966, elected as VP in 1968
*Sarah Palin: elected as governor of Alaska in 2006, nominated for VP in 2008
Nixon and Agnew each had just 6 years of service in elected office prior to becoming VP. [George H. W. Bush had 4 years in the House followed by a string of rather important appointed offices.] On the Democratic side, besides Shriver two other VP nominees in recent times were comparably inexperienced: Geraldine Ferraro (6 years in the House) and John Edwards (6 years in the Senate), though each balanced a running-mate with 20+ years of elected service. The Trump-Vance ticket’s combined 6 years in elected office is low by modern standards [though equaled by Eisenhower-Nixon in 1952], and certainly pales in comparison to the would-be 2024 Biden-Harris ticket’s 50 + 21 = 71 years(!). Trump-Vance is also the first ticket since Bush-Cheney in 2000 where the running mates’ terms in elected (or appointed) office never overlapped [funnily enough, Bush was an unsuccessful nominee for U.S. House in 1978, the same year Cheney was first elected].
In 2020 I mentioned the coincidental streak that in every presidential election after 1980, exactly three of the four individuals on the major-party tickets had prior service in Congress. Depending on Harris’s choice of running mate, that may not be true this year.
Finally, Biden’s withdrawal adds another major item to an already eerie list of parallels between 1968 and 2024: the president winning the New Hampshire primary via write-in vote, against a challenger from Minnesota; the president losing ground among young voters due to a foreign entanglement; the Democratic National Convention taking place in Chicago; the Republican nominee attempting a comeback after having previously lost a presidential election; and a candidate with the name Robert F. Kennedy.
* James Knox Polk: 4 of 03 1845 ~ 4 of 03 1849
* James Buchanan (jr): 4 of 03 1857 ~ 4 of 03 1861
* Rutherford Birchard Hayes: 4 of 03 1877 ~ 4 of 03 1881
* Joseph Robinette Biden (jr): 20 of 01 2021 ~ 20 of 01 2025(?)
– 1) precisely four years _and_ 2) not ended/ending(?) with a loss for a bid for another term (an extremely small subset indeed) !