Image: AP Photo/Brynn Anderson
With just a day to go before the final votes are cast in the 2020 United States presidential elections, both leading candidates — incumbent President and Republican Donald Trump and the Democratic Party’s Joe Biden — are pulling out all the stops to emerge victorious.
Voters have been urged to either cast their ballots early or send them through mail, to avoid queues on Election Day, amid the novel
coronavirus pandemic. Thus, millions of votes have already been cast across the United States.
The US Election Project pegs that number at
about 93.2 million as of November 1. Plus, about 31.9 million mail ballots are yet to be returned to polling authorities. That should happen over the next couple of days. Thus, with over 100 million votes having been cast even before Election Day, Trump’s and Biden’s campaigns are now mainly aimed at securing votes of those who opt to vote in-person at polling stations on November 3.
Traditionally, the Democrats do well in states such as California, Washington and Oregon, among others (‘Blue’ states). The Republicans do equally well in Arkansas, Oklahoma and Louisiana (‘Red’ states). The fate of the two leading candidates is more or less sealed in these states. But there remain a number of states where the winner is still unclear or the lead is not decisive. These are the ‘battleground states’.
What are battleground states?
Under the American political system, the president is not directly elected by the people but by the Electoral College — a constitutional group of 538 members. This group is formed every four years to elect the president and the vice-president.
Each state legislature determines the manner in which they want to choose their electors. Other than Maine and Nebraska, states require electors to pledge all votes for that state's winning candidate (by popular vote). Thus, under this ‘winner takes all’ method, a candidate who secures the popular vote in California wins 55 electoral votes. A candidate needs at least 270 such electoral votes to win the election.
A battleground state or a ‘swing state’ refers to any state that can be won by any of the candidates. As votes there are likely to swing, it remains unclear as to which candidate the state’s people are opting for. Thus, the fate of a large number of crucial electoral votes remains unknown until the votes are counted.
However, a state many not swing in every election. Constant changes in the demography and ideological leanings lead states to stop swinging. Other states, which had backed a particular political party, may start swinging due to the same factors.
Which states are swinging in 2020?
According to US election analytics website FiveThirtyEight, the states of Arizona, Georgia,
Florida, Iowa, Michigan,
Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas and Wisconsin are “perennial” swing states. They have seen close contests regularly in the last two decades.
What makes battleground states important?
A candidate winning the popular vote in a big state, even with a margin of 1 percent, bags a large number of Electoral College votes.
Take, for example, Pennsylvania. Most opinion polls dated November 1 show Biden leading the state by 4 percentage points. That is a small margin which can be flipped quickly. Yet, it is a matter of winning or losing 20 electoral votes. This makes battleground states very important for both leading candidates. They can prove to be the margin between a win and a loss.
Who’s leading in the battleground states?
Biden is leading in eight battleground states (by aggregate, in major opinion polls, as of November 1). They are: Arizona, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. However, in many of these cases, the margin is less than 5 percentage points.
Trump is leading in Georgia and Ohio. Additionally, the US President also holds an advantage in Texas — a traditional ‘red state’ — which is also
being seen as a swing state this time.
