Here's another way to think about it: it's a product of the nationalization of US politics. Each state's average swing in two-party vote share between elections used to be much higher and there used to be less correlation between states, because politics was more local. Hence the idea of a "swing state" was unnecessary because consequential swings could happen in nearly all states. Now US politics is both more national and more calcified, and the "swing states" that are left are the ones in which changes can still plausibly matter to the outcome.
I would like to add a comment on the electoral college from a completely different perspective, that of national security. I would be hard pressed to find a system increasingly more vulnerable to the evil machinations of foreign and domestic actors than the Electoral College system and the unique concept of swing states. It is ridiculously easy and cheap for these folks to focus exclusively on the swing states whereas a popular vote for the president would require vast resources of time and money to enable tampering with the election.
Interestingly, all statewide offices (governor, senators, attorneys general) are run as popular votes and nobody complains about them except where there is voter suppression.
The consequences of running a 21st Century superpower with an 18th Century constitution deserve more attention. But is this really the biggest problem?
Adam's excellent discussion reveals these seven swing states to be pretty diverse and to bracket national medians in a number of ways. Forcing politicians to engage in retail politics in geographically limited areas has advantages, and highlights issues that affect small but relevant constituencies. Do we want to cultivate a tyranny of the national majority against minority interests?
I see very little discussion about voter turnout. Has it been consistent over the years in the swing states or counties? I somehow doubt it. Turnout is low which means small changes matter and do it is a n issue of which candidate is able to motivate voters to take the trouble to vote.
I think you may be overestimating the effects of recent cultural "sorting" in creating red and blue, that is non-swing, states. Many deep red and deep blue states are that way because of legacies arising from the long-resident population. This is particularly visible in the white south, whose current deep red loyalty in most states reflects, I suspect, less "red home seeking" in-migration than members of long-resident white families and their historical religious and racial attitudes. Likewise, long-red states that have become "swing" states--Georgia and Arizona, but also Virginia and Texas to some extent (though not in this election) have become swing states because liberal-leaning knowledge worker types have been migrating there for economic reasons, not because they're looking to live in a state governed by liberals, which GA, AZ, VA, and TX historically, and mostly still, are not. Similarly, the in-migration that has turned California deep blue has happened in strong measure for economic reasons, though that the Pacific coast as a whole may be a region where cultural sorting plays a specially strong role.
I think you would see more cultural sorting on the county level--but again this may have as much to do with economics and urban-rural divides, as with liberals seeking other liberals to live with, and so on. On general principles, it's also worth quoting a line attributed to James Carville: "What state lies between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia? Alabama."
In 2020, there were concerns about the legitimacy of some votes. Some people felt that the left didn't want to investigate where all the votes at 5:00 am came from. They believed that if the situation had been reversed, the right would have felt the same way. They also felt that the left always gets what they want, while the right gets labeled as racists, xenophobes, and weirdos. The power of large metropolitan cities, which are predominantly held by Democratic leaders, is stronger than many people realize. Even though there may be 30-40% of voters who are moderates or right of center, they feel that their participation in local governments is almost non-existent because they believe it's a hopeless waste of time to try to bring about any change. 80% of Americans live in large urban areas. The space between Philly and Pittsburgh called Alabama has 20% of the population.
The issue is actually about the size of the counties. Big counties are generally big cities (Dem), small counties are rural (Rep). The election was won as Adam points out in 5 counties. The Counting was critical in just 5 places and supervised by a handful of people.
Perhaps another reason these voters are capable of voting for either party nationally is because they're comfortable switching sides locally? It would explain why they don't feel strongly one way or another.
If an election came down to a very near split, 80,000,001 voters v. 79,999,999, IF that split happened, then nobody would believe the count. And that would probably be true for anything within a half point. In other words, we would need something as a backup to a complete nothing but the votes national system. If it came down to a single vote or even within a half percentage point, we'd be counting and recounting forever.
In 2020, there were concerns about the legitimacy of some votes. Some people felt that the left didn't want to investigate where all the votes at 5:00 am came from. They believed that if the situation had been reversed, the right would have felt the same way. They also felt that the left always gets what they want, while the right gets labeled as racists, xenophobes, and weirdos. The power of large metropolitan cities, which are predominantly held by Democratic leaders, is stronger than many people realize. Even though there may be 30-40% of voters who are moderates or right of center, they feel that their participation in local governments is almost non-existent because they believe it's a hopeless waste of time to try to bring about any change. 80% of Americans live in large urban areas. The space between Philly and Pittsburgh called Alabama has 20% of the population.
While there was no evidence that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, there were (as always) a few fraudulent votes. There are always a few fraudulent votes---usually running roughly 50-50 between the parties. The evidence is overwhelming that Biden won and that it was a fair election.
So much for that. But Charlie of SF Bay shows what can happen if an election is close. People will not believe the result. There will always be suspicions of mistakes in the count and machines breaking down and people prevented from voting. Along those lines consider what happened in the past if in a tight election one side won because there was rain on election day. The rain helped on side and hurt the other. But people accepted that was the result. Would people be so willing to accept the result today? In North Carolina, if the roads are not all fixed by election day would the loser accept a loss?
So consider a national election in which the vote is close. Would the losing side accept it? Would the election be questioned forever? So I suggest that any national popular vote have a backup plan if it is very close, and that backup plan probably would have to be the Electoral College. So, yes, we should have a national popular vote. But let us be realistic. It has not been a close vote for a long time---but it could happen.
People felt concerns, , but upon examination their concerns turned out to be unfounded. Trump lost 50+ court cased and did not convince a single state Secretary of State.
Groundless feelings are still a factor to be considered in real-world politics, but in this case their a factor in a possible insurrection.
Republicans have been talking about voter fraud for 20+ years (Hans von Spakovsky has made a career of it), but without bringing forward cedible evidence of a significant amount of fraud.
Yes US elections are crazy - they were designed to stop one group of states dominate another and are democratic at the level of the Electoral college, not for individual voters. Marginal voting at County level was never considered.
Theory 4 & 5. The jump from 60.1% turnout to 66.6% suggests that mobilisation of voters (or just voting papers) has been critical.
So theory 4 suggests that legitimate efforts to mobilise previously infrequent votes has had a big effect in 2020 and may continue to have same effect in 2024. (A prediction might be that mobilised black voters are less likely to vote against Trump this time, and more likely to vote for him - we will see).
Theory 5 suggests that much of the mobilisation has been of voting papers, and that much of this effort has been illegitimate.
Note the single county Maricopa - which accounted for two thirds of the whole Arizona vote in 2020. In 2012 1.38m voters gave Trump a 10.7% advantage.
In 2016 1.58m voters gave him a 2.8% advantage
In 2020 2.08m voters voted Bided by 2.2%
The population grew by 13% in 8 years and votes went up 50.4%. Some mobilisation.
I can't find the Maricopa turnout, but the state wide turnout was 79.9%!!
So it is about Mobilisation for sure.
Theory 4 or 5 - you choose.
Georgia (0.24%), Wisconsin (0.61%) and Arizona (0.31%) were won by Biden on tiny margins and much controversy.
If they went the other way the College would have been a tie!!
DeKalb, Cobb, Gwinnett, Fulton (7%, 8%, 8%, 11%) make up 34% of Georgia's vote.
Waukesha, Dane and Milwaukee (8%, 10%, 14%) make up 32% of Wisconsins votes
Pima and Maricopa (15%, 61%) make up 76% of Arizona's votes.
Big cities, Dem local authorities, last counties to report counts, big black constituencies who might not vote. These facts support both theories.
Maricopa btw is the city of Phoenix plus a lot of surrounding areas.
Note UK system is similarly archaic I agree, But consistent sizes of Counting areas (constituencies) means there will never be scope for mass cheating as there is in US.
If true, the US having their own elections rigged is a great irony, on a par with the Chinese flooding the country with opiates.
Electoral votes are not allocated by county, so the idea of swing counties is spurious. It doesn't matter where voters are *within* any given state. You could have a swing state with no "swing counties."
The concept of 'swing state' is the same as marginal seat or marginal electorate in Australia. You may find scholarly literature on it by Murray Goot and Ian Macallister. The concept has been embedded in professional pitocal party practice for more than 20, maybe 40 years. Parties in Australia copy US electoral politics technologies. It has become a manipulative game divorced from and parasitical on governing.
The dirty secret of democracy - like that of capitalism - is that for all the celebration of competition and choice, in fact, the players in the system all dream of the day in which competition will cease and they will command a legal monopoly. Their nightmare is the opposite, that the other side establishes that lock-grip.
This paragraph should be on billboards across the country there's no hope for change if people are blind to the real game being played around them
I thought this was very thought-provoking, though disheartening and scary because I don't see how the outdated Electoral System gets changed and updated. The incentives are simply too great to maintain the status quo.
1) If we switched to the popular vote, ca and ny would just ballot harvest brown people to win every time.
2) I don’t think it’s the end of the world that suburbs/exurbs in swing states are the focus, they are moderate by nature.
3) red states are growing and blue states are declining. It’s notable that you don’t mention a former swing state, Florida, which is no longer a swing state and one of the countries most economically dynamic and populous.
The reason the question seems to be matter of which discursive button to push is because major redistributive policy is off the menu. Why can't / won't the major parties offer people super popular things like a raise in the minimum wage? I'm guessing economic elite capture of US politics, from which follows the non-existence of pluralism, is the go-to for an answer to that. I suppose AT is taking this as read, but it bears mentioning that winning options are precluded by these dynamics.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but Mormonism is not prevalent in the midwest. It is prevalent in an area that is more or less west of the middle of the country, but that is not the midwest.
Here's another way to think about it: it's a product of the nationalization of US politics. Each state's average swing in two-party vote share between elections used to be much higher and there used to be less correlation between states, because politics was more local. Hence the idea of a "swing state" was unnecessary because consequential swings could happen in nearly all states. Now US politics is both more national and more calcified, and the "swing states" that are left are the ones in which changes can still plausibly matter to the outcome.
I would like to add a comment on the electoral college from a completely different perspective, that of national security. I would be hard pressed to find a system increasingly more vulnerable to the evil machinations of foreign and domestic actors than the Electoral College system and the unique concept of swing states. It is ridiculously easy and cheap for these folks to focus exclusively on the swing states whereas a popular vote for the president would require vast resources of time and money to enable tampering with the election.
Interestingly, all statewide offices (governor, senators, attorneys general) are run as popular votes and nobody complains about them except where there is voter suppression.
The consequences of running a 21st Century superpower with an 18th Century constitution deserve more attention. But is this really the biggest problem?
Adam's excellent discussion reveals these seven swing states to be pretty diverse and to bracket national medians in a number of ways. Forcing politicians to engage in retail politics in geographically limited areas has advantages, and highlights issues that affect small but relevant constituencies. Do we want to cultivate a tyranny of the national majority against minority interests?
I see very little discussion about voter turnout. Has it been consistent over the years in the swing states or counties? I somehow doubt it. Turnout is low which means small changes matter and do it is a n issue of which candidate is able to motivate voters to take the trouble to vote.
I think you may be overestimating the effects of recent cultural "sorting" in creating red and blue, that is non-swing, states. Many deep red and deep blue states are that way because of legacies arising from the long-resident population. This is particularly visible in the white south, whose current deep red loyalty in most states reflects, I suspect, less "red home seeking" in-migration than members of long-resident white families and their historical religious and racial attitudes. Likewise, long-red states that have become "swing" states--Georgia and Arizona, but also Virginia and Texas to some extent (though not in this election) have become swing states because liberal-leaning knowledge worker types have been migrating there for economic reasons, not because they're looking to live in a state governed by liberals, which GA, AZ, VA, and TX historically, and mostly still, are not. Similarly, the in-migration that has turned California deep blue has happened in strong measure for economic reasons, though that the Pacific coast as a whole may be a region where cultural sorting plays a specially strong role.
I think you would see more cultural sorting on the county level--but again this may have as much to do with economics and urban-rural divides, as with liberals seeking other liberals to live with, and so on. On general principles, it's also worth quoting a line attributed to James Carville: "What state lies between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia? Alabama."
In 2020, there were concerns about the legitimacy of some votes. Some people felt that the left didn't want to investigate where all the votes at 5:00 am came from. They believed that if the situation had been reversed, the right would have felt the same way. They also felt that the left always gets what they want, while the right gets labeled as racists, xenophobes, and weirdos. The power of large metropolitan cities, which are predominantly held by Democratic leaders, is stronger than many people realize. Even though there may be 30-40% of voters who are moderates or right of center, they feel that their participation in local governments is almost non-existent because they believe it's a hopeless waste of time to try to bring about any change. 80% of Americans live in large urban areas. The space between Philly and Pittsburgh called Alabama has 20% of the population.
The issue is actually about the size of the counties. Big counties are generally big cities (Dem), small counties are rural (Rep). The election was won as Adam points out in 5 counties. The Counting was critical in just 5 places and supervised by a handful of people.
See my other response to the article later today.
Perhaps another reason these voters are capable of voting for either party nationally is because they're comfortable switching sides locally? It would explain why they don't feel strongly one way or another.
If an election came down to a very near split, 80,000,001 voters v. 79,999,999, IF that split happened, then nobody would believe the count. And that would probably be true for anything within a half point. In other words, we would need something as a backup to a complete nothing but the votes national system. If it came down to a single vote or even within a half percentage point, we'd be counting and recounting forever.
In 2020, there were concerns about the legitimacy of some votes. Some people felt that the left didn't want to investigate where all the votes at 5:00 am came from. They believed that if the situation had been reversed, the right would have felt the same way. They also felt that the left always gets what they want, while the right gets labeled as racists, xenophobes, and weirdos. The power of large metropolitan cities, which are predominantly held by Democratic leaders, is stronger than many people realize. Even though there may be 30-40% of voters who are moderates or right of center, they feel that their participation in local governments is almost non-existent because they believe it's a hopeless waste of time to try to bring about any change. 80% of Americans live in large urban areas. The space between Philly and Pittsburgh called Alabama has 20% of the population.
While there was no evidence that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, there were (as always) a few fraudulent votes. There are always a few fraudulent votes---usually running roughly 50-50 between the parties. The evidence is overwhelming that Biden won and that it was a fair election.
So much for that. But Charlie of SF Bay shows what can happen if an election is close. People will not believe the result. There will always be suspicions of mistakes in the count and machines breaking down and people prevented from voting. Along those lines consider what happened in the past if in a tight election one side won because there was rain on election day. The rain helped on side and hurt the other. But people accepted that was the result. Would people be so willing to accept the result today? In North Carolina, if the roads are not all fixed by election day would the loser accept a loss?
So consider a national election in which the vote is close. Would the losing side accept it? Would the election be questioned forever? So I suggest that any national popular vote have a backup plan if it is very close, and that backup plan probably would have to be the Electoral College. So, yes, we should have a national popular vote. But let us be realistic. It has not been a close vote for a long time---but it could happen.
People felt concerns, , but upon examination their concerns turned out to be unfounded. Trump lost 50+ court cased and did not convince a single state Secretary of State.
Groundless feelings are still a factor to be considered in real-world politics, but in this case their a factor in a possible insurrection.
Republicans have been talking about voter fraud for 20+ years (Hans von Spakovsky has made a career of it), but without bringing forward cedible evidence of a significant amount of fraud.
The left always gets what they want like in 2000 when Al Gore was elected president after a recount of Florida votes.
Yes US elections are crazy - they were designed to stop one group of states dominate another and are democratic at the level of the Electoral college, not for individual voters. Marginal voting at County level was never considered.
Theory 4 & 5. The jump from 60.1% turnout to 66.6% suggests that mobilisation of voters (or just voting papers) has been critical.
So theory 4 suggests that legitimate efforts to mobilise previously infrequent votes has had a big effect in 2020 and may continue to have same effect in 2024. (A prediction might be that mobilised black voters are less likely to vote against Trump this time, and more likely to vote for him - we will see).
Theory 5 suggests that much of the mobilisation has been of voting papers, and that much of this effort has been illegitimate.
Note the single county Maricopa - which accounted for two thirds of the whole Arizona vote in 2020. In 2012 1.38m voters gave Trump a 10.7% advantage.
In 2016 1.58m voters gave him a 2.8% advantage
In 2020 2.08m voters voted Bided by 2.2%
The population grew by 13% in 8 years and votes went up 50.4%. Some mobilisation.
I can't find the Maricopa turnout, but the state wide turnout was 79.9%!!
So it is about Mobilisation for sure.
Theory 4 or 5 - you choose.
Georgia (0.24%), Wisconsin (0.61%) and Arizona (0.31%) were won by Biden on tiny margins and much controversy.
If they went the other way the College would have been a tie!!
DeKalb, Cobb, Gwinnett, Fulton (7%, 8%, 8%, 11%) make up 34% of Georgia's vote.
Waukesha, Dane and Milwaukee (8%, 10%, 14%) make up 32% of Wisconsins votes
Pima and Maricopa (15%, 61%) make up 76% of Arizona's votes.
Big cities, Dem local authorities, last counties to report counts, big black constituencies who might not vote. These facts support both theories.
Maricopa btw is the city of Phoenix plus a lot of surrounding areas.
Note UK system is similarly archaic I agree, But consistent sizes of Counting areas (constituencies) means there will never be scope for mass cheating as there is in US.
If true, the US having their own elections rigged is a great irony, on a par with the Chinese flooding the country with opiates.
Electoral votes are not allocated by county, so the idea of swing counties is spurious. It doesn't matter where voters are *within* any given state. You could have a swing state with no "swing counties."
The concept of 'swing state' is the same as marginal seat or marginal electorate in Australia. You may find scholarly literature on it by Murray Goot and Ian Macallister. The concept has been embedded in professional pitocal party practice for more than 20, maybe 40 years. Parties in Australia copy US electoral politics technologies. It has become a manipulative game divorced from and parasitical on governing.
The dirty secret of democracy - like that of capitalism - is that for all the celebration of competition and choice, in fact, the players in the system all dream of the day in which competition will cease and they will command a legal monopoly. Their nightmare is the opposite, that the other side establishes that lock-grip.
This paragraph should be on billboards across the country there's no hope for change if people are blind to the real game being played around them
I thought this was very thought-provoking, though disheartening and scary because I don't see how the outdated Electoral System gets changed and updated. The incentives are simply too great to maintain the status quo.
1) If we switched to the popular vote, ca and ny would just ballot harvest brown people to win every time.
2) I don’t think it’s the end of the world that suburbs/exurbs in swing states are the focus, they are moderate by nature.
3) red states are growing and blue states are declining. It’s notable that you don’t mention a former swing state, Florida, which is no longer a swing state and one of the countries most economically dynamic and populous.
a retarded system for a retarded country.
The reason the question seems to be matter of which discursive button to push is because major redistributive policy is off the menu. Why can't / won't the major parties offer people super popular things like a raise in the minimum wage? I'm guessing economic elite capture of US politics, from which follows the non-existence of pluralism, is the go-to for an answer to that. I suppose AT is taking this as read, but it bears mentioning that winning options are precluded by these dynamics.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but Mormonism is not prevalent in the midwest. It is prevalent in an area that is more or less west of the middle of the country, but that is not the midwest.