In United States presidential politics, a swing state (also, battleground state or purple state) is a state in which no single candidate or party has overwhelming support in securing that 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 electoral votes. Non-swing states are sometimes called safe states, because one candidate has strong enough support that he or she can safely assume that he or she will win the state's votes.
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In U.S. presidential elections, the Electoral College system allows each state to decide the method by which it awards electors. Since in most states the legislature wants to increase the voting power of the majority, all states except Maine and Nebraska (explained below) use a winner-take-all system (as opposed to a majority electoral system) where the candidate who wins the most popular votes in a state wins all of that state's electoral votes. Under this system no advantage is gained by winning more than a plurality of the vote, nor is there any advantage gained by winning additional votes in a state that will still be lost. In other words, Presidential candidates have no incentive to spend time or resources in states they are likely to win or lose by a sizable margin.
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 expect to easily win many of the Southern states like Mississippi, Alabama, and South Carolina, which historically have a very conservative culture and a more recent history of voting for Republican candidates. They could also expect to win states like Wyoming, Idaho and Nebraska, which share conservative values but have had a longer history of voting Republican. Similarly, the same candidate can expect to lose California, Vermont, Massachusetts, Oregon, Hawaii, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New York, 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, the apportionment of electoral votes parallels that for Senators and Congressional Representatives. 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 had 4 and Nebraska had 5; the minimum is 3) and are usually not considered swing states (Maine is generally considered a Democratic-leaning state while Nebraska is typically thought to be a Republican state). Despite their different rules, only once has either state split its electoral votes--Nebraska in 2008, giving 4 votes to Senator John McCain and one to Senator Barack Obama.
In the 2004 elections, Colorado voted on Amendment 36, an initiative which 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.
The Oregon Daily Emerald cited University of Oregon political science professor Joel Bloom as mentioning three factors in identifying a swing state: "examining statewide opinion polls, political party registration numbers and the results of previous elections." The article also cites Leighton Woodhouse, co-director of "Driving Votes," as claiming that there is a general consensus among most groups regarding about 75 percent of the states typically thought of as swing states. [1]
In December 2008, Sean Quinn (of FiveThirtyEight.com) did a statistical analysis of the eight Mountain West states, and their change in vote from 2004 to 2008, thus concluding that they were the "new" swing region in the United States.[2]
The swing states of Ohio, Connecticut, Indiana, New Jersey and New York were key to the outcome of the 1888 election,[3] Likewise, Illinois[4] and Texas were key to the outcome of the 1960 election. Florida was the key to the 2000 election. Ohio was the key to the 2004 election. Ohio since the 1980's, has gained a reputation as a swing state.[5][6]
Those in favor of a national popular vote as the method for electing the president argue that the electoral system gives swing states arbitrarily large power in determining the result of an election, and therefore receive an undeservedly large proportion of attention and campaign funds. Although a constitutional amendment would be the simplest form for changing the rules, the difficulty of the task has led to a proposal to make States enter a National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. The reform is hotly debated within State assemblies, because it would arguably change the nature of the election.