Sofia Benavides
(CNN) – Anyone who even remotely follows American politics must have heard some version of this statement: The 2024 elections, which will elect a president for a country of more than 330 million people, will be defined by a small number of voters in some key states.
In 2020, Joe Biden turned a handful of red states blue to defeat then-President Donald Trump. The difference between victory and defeat was a small fraction of voters in those states.
In 2024, it could again be small margins in these few states that make the difference between another Trump Republican presidency or a victory for Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee.
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Still, saying that a small number of voters “decide” the election is a gross oversimplification of the American system and how it has evolved. Here, an explanation of how it really works.
When voters cast their ballots, whether on Election Day or in advance, they are actually selecting a list of electors tied to the candidate who wins the popular vote in each state.
Electors then cast votes for president and vice president in each state’s capital on December 17. That meeting is known as the Electoral College, and is required in the Constitution.
The Electoral College is made up of a total of 538 votes, which are divided among the 50 states and the District of Columbia. Each state gets at least three votes, depending on the size of its congressional delegation.
Voters line up to cast their ballots on the first day of early in-person voting in one of the mountain counties severely affected by Hurricane Helene, in Marion, North Carolina, on October 17, 2024. (Jonathan Drake/Reuters)
Smaller states get three (they have two senators and one member of Congress). The city of Washington also gets three. More populous states get many more. California gets 54 electoral votes (it has two senators and 52 congressional districts). Texas has 40, Florida has 30, New York has 28 and so on.
The winner of the election is the presidential candidate who obtains 270 electoral votes or more. If no candidate reaches 270 electoral votes, the House of Representatives chooses the winner from among the candidates who obtained electoral votes.
In the 2016 or 2020 presidential elections, a dozen states were decided by 5 percentage points or less.
Looked at another way, we can expect those states where last elections were close to also be close again in 2024. Polls support this idea.
What are the swing states in 2024?
It is believed that there are seven states that could be won by either candidate, making them swing states. As a result, campaigns have focused their energy on these areas. They can be divided into two general categories.
Three battlegrounds in the Midwest, also known as “the blue wall”: These are the states with a large manufacturing and union presence of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. They used to be Democrats, but have changed in recent years as their demographics have changed; so Trump has managed to attract white voters without a college degree.
When Trump won the White House in 2016, he won all three. When Biden won in 2020, he won all three. If Harris wins all three this year, she will likely have the electoral votes needed to become the next president. But polls suggest close races in all three. Turnout will be key, which for Harris means appealing to suburban women and Black voters. All three states have urban centers.
The three blue wall states tend to vote the same way. The last time they didn’t all go to the same candidate was 1988, notably also a year when California was Republican and West Virginia was Democratic. In the eight elections since 1988, the only time blue wall states went to a Republican was in 2016, when they were won by Trump.
Four battlegrounds of the “Sun Belt”: These states with growing populations include Arizona and Nevada in the West and North Carolina and Georgia in the East. Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina used to be Republican. Trump won North Carolina twice, but the margins were close in 2020. The last Democrat to win there was Barack Obama in 2008. Biden was the first Democrat to win Georgia since Bill Clinton in 1992 and Arizona since Clinton in 1996.
A vote in Nebraska is a battleground: 48 states award their electoral votes to the winner in their state. Nebraska and Maine do it differently, awarding votes by congressional district. The state of Nebraska is safe territory for Trump, but the congressional district around Omaha is a battleground. That vote could end up being very important in the event of a close race in the Electoral College.
Note: It is the reverse situation in Maine, the only other state that does not award all of its electors to the state winner. Trump could get a single electoral vote in Maine.
This article featured reporting by CNN’s Zachary B. Wolf and Renée Rigdon.
