Swing state
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A swing state (also, battleground state) in United States presidential politics is a state in which no candidate has overwhelming support, meaning that any of the major candidates have a reasonable chance of winning the state's electoral college votes. Such states are targets of both major political parties in presidential elections, since winning these states is the best opportunity for a party to gain votes. Non-swing states are sometimes called safe states, because one candidate has strong enough support, that they can safely assume they will win the state's votes.
Origin of swing states
In the presidential elections of the United States, the U.S. Electoral College system means that only the winner of a state receives any benefits from it (i.e. electoral votes). If a campaign wins a plurality of the popular vote in a state, the candidate receives all of that state's electoral votes; no benefit is gained from receiving additional votes above the margin necessary to win (this is true of 48 of the 50 states and the District of Columbia; the two exceptions, Maine and Nebraska, are explained below). This fact produces a very particular set of circumstances that explains the existence of swing states.
Since a national campaign is interested in electoral votes, rather than the national popular vote, it tends to ignore states that it believes it will win easily; since it will win these without significant campaigning, any effort put into them is essentially wasted. A similar logic dictates that the campaign avoid putting any effort into states that it knows it will lose. For instance, a Republican candidate (the more conservative of the two major parties) can easily expect to win Texas and several other Southern states, which historically have a very conservative culture and a more recent history of voting for Republican candidates. Similarly, the same candidate can expect to lose Rhode Island and Massachusetts, traditionally liberal states, no matter how much campaigning is done in those states. The only states which the campaign would target to spend time, money, and energy in are those that could be won by either candidate. These are the swing states.
In Maine and Nebraska, two electoral votes go to the person who wins a plurality in the state, and a candidate gets one additional electoral vote for each Congressional District in which they receive a plurality. Both of these states have relatively few electoral votes (for the 2004 election, Maine has 4 and Nebraska has 5; the minimum is 3) and are usually not considered swing states (Maine is generally considered a Democratic state while Nebraska is typically thought to be a Republican-leaning state). Despite their different rules, neither has ever had a split electoral vote.
In the 2004 elections Colorado voted on an initiative that would have allocated the state's electoral votes in proportion to the popular vote in the state. The initiative would have taken effect immediately, applying to the selection of electors in the same election. However, the initiative failed and Colorado remains under the winner-take-all system that is present in 48 states.
Determining swing states
The actual procedures for deciding which states are swing states in any particular election varies across campaigns and across disciplines. Many political scientists use historical voting patterns: the more often a state has been won by candidates of one party in the past, the more likely it is to vote for that party in the future. Other factors that can help determine which states are swing states are:
- The state's results from the last presidential election
- The state's results from the last several presidential elections
- Opinion polls
- Any historical trends that the campaign believes might lead a state to vote for one party or another
- The state of origin of the candidate, and also that of the candidate for Vice President
Historical swing states
The swing states of Illinois and New York were key to the outcome of the 1888 election. The swing states of Illinois and Texas were key to the outcome of the 1960 election; however, today Illinois (D), New York (D) and Texas (R) are not considered swing states. Ohio has often been considered a swing state, particularly during the 2004 election, having voted with the winner in every election since the 1950s except for 1960. The most reliable swing state of the last 100 years has been Missouri which has voted for the winner of every presidential election since 1904, save for its support of Adlai Stevenson in 1956. Florida was key to the outcome of the 2000 election.
Current Swing States
- New Hampshire
- Pennsylvania
- Florida
- Ohio
- Michigan
- Missouri
- Wisconsin
- Iowa
- Oregon
- New Mexico
- Nevada
- Colorado
- Minnesota
Other terms for swing state
- Battleground state
- Purple state, so named because purple is the combination of the colors red and blue, which (since the 2000 election) are used to represent Republican- and Democratic-majority states, respectively. See red state-blue state divide.
See also
- Red state vs. blue state divide
- Pivot state
- Marginal seat in other countries' elections
- List of 2000 swing states
- List of 2004 swing states
External links
- [Better World Links on Battleground States & Swing State Polls]
- [Coverage of battleground states in 2000 election] from CNN
- [Guide to the 2004 swing states] from Slate
- [Battleground states] from Democracy in Action site hosted by George Washington University
- [The Swing States] from Intervention Magazine
- [Swing State Project], a law student's weblog
- [The Bush campaign memo detailing its look at the swing states (PDF file)]
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