Paths to Electoral College Victory
Does it really all come down to Pennsylvania?
POLITICO politics bureau chief Jonathan Martin asserts, “The Actual Electoral Map Is Three States.”
There are really only three states that will decide the presidential election: Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Georgia.
If Vice President Kamala Harris can’t carry Pennsylvania, her only hope is on a Southern strategy. Harris must win either Georgia or North Carolina. She has no other path to the White House. The election could well be determined when polls close in the eastern time zone. (Well, yes, after the ballots are all counted.)
This isn’t to say the other four battlegrounds — Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada and Arizona — aren’t important. If Harris loses Pennsylvania, which her aides acknowledge is a highly challenging state, she’d still need to pick up one of the two Western states as well as one of the two Southern states to win — so long as she carries Michigan and Wisconsin.
Yet none of those other four battlegrounds are relevant if Trump first blocks her in Pennsylvania, Georgia and North Carolina.
It’s the most obvious route for the former president and a reminder of the advantage the Electoral College can confer on a Republican. Should Trump defeat Harris in Pennsylvania, a state President Joe Biden spent much of his childhood in and still only carried by about 80,000 votes, her hopes then hinge on a pair of slightly right-of-center states Democrats have carried once each in this century: North Carolina (won by Barack Obama in 2008) and Georgia, which lined up with Biden in 2024.
Given how much the dynamics of the race have changed since Harris replaced Biden as the presumptive Democratic nominee, seemingly opening up multiple paths to an Electoral College victory, I was skeptical of this claim.
But the starting interactive map at 270ToWin looks like this:
Harris has a 7-Elector lead, needing only 44 Electors to win it all. But, sure enough, if Trump wins Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Georgia—and loses the other four swing states—he wins:
Frankly, if Harris carries Georgia (as Biden did in 2020), she’ll almost certainly carry Arizona and Nevada (as Biden did in 2020) as well. And it wouldn’t surprise me if she actually carried all of the swing states, adding North Carolina’s 16 Electors and turning the race into a relative blowout. Georgia is historically a deep red state, after all.
Similarly, if Trump wins Pennsylvania, as he did in 2016, he’ll almost certainly carry both Georgia and North Carolina. And he’s quite likely to win Wisconsin and Michigan (as he did in 2020) as well, turning the race into an Electoral landslide.
Once again, the whole discussion just points to the absurdity of our method for choosing Presidents. The entire focus becomes marginal outcomes in a handful of states rather than the will of the people.
There appears to be something going on in NC, as Mark Robinson has cancelled campaign events today. Apparently, ballots are sent out starting tomorrow, so whatever this CNN piece is, it could have an impact on voting.
The GOP’s candidate choices, which are unexceptional to put it mildly, might have an impact on the race in swing states, along with early/absentee voting.
That said, the electoral college is sorely outdated and has the effect of putting far, far, far too much importance on a handful of states.
There is a GOP attempt currently in NE to switch to winner-take-all before the election.
If it succeeds it affects this analysis.
(because Harris would then only have 269 not 270 by carrying only PA/WI/MN)
It’s a terribly stupid system, though I suppose it made some kind of sense when people (wrongly) thought of states as independent, and failed to anticipate things like California with 40,000,000 people and Wyoming with ~0 people, if you round down to the nearest half million. It’s almost as if even very intelligent and diligent men, doing their best, 237 years ago, could not guess what was coming in the future.
@Jen:
There was speculation in a NC newspaper that another paper would drop a story substantiating the rumors of Robinson’s porn addiction. Add to that the Felon and R’s in NC are trying to get Robinson to drop out before Thursday because he’s doing to crumby. The party can replace him as the candidate, but his name will stay on the ballot, that deadline has passed.
Well this explains why a Guardian (?) article about leaked email communications among election officials in Georgia matters. It was on my Yahoo front page this morning, but I didn’t save the link to post here. Between the US and the ME, it’s getting to be a better and better time to be so old that I no longer GAF. Having no kids to worry about the futures of is merely a bonus.
@Sleeping Dog: I saw a post on X (so accuracy is questionable) that CNN was able to confirm Robinson’s posting on some message boards. I suppose we’ll know soon enough, but that video of Robinson comparing himself to Clarence Thomas…is something. Whatever this story is, it’s got to be bad.
ETA: Yep, there it is, and it’s not good: https://x.com/yashar/status/1836849043105890683
@Jen: Don’t worry. He says it wasn’t him (despite most of the article detailing the dozen ways CNN confirmed it was).
@Jen:
No surprise that someone as outspoken as Robinson in denigrating transitioning individuals would himself, be attracted to transgender porn. Seems to work that way quite often.
@Sleeping Dog: This is another place where I am “out of step with my fellows.” The fact that he is addicted to porn is of interest to me as a disqualification. That he appears to be an vicious hateful person is what makes him unfit for office. His vices are of no consequence except to the degree that they make him vulnerable to outside influences. And even that danger has usually been greatly exaggerated.