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In United States presidential politics, a swing state is a U.S. state that "swings" between the two major political parties in presidential elections, rendering it a very attractive campaign target.
In the presidential electionss of the United States, the U.S. Electoral College system means that only the winner of a state receives any benefits from it (i.e. electoral votes). If a campaign wins 51% of the vote in a state, it receives all of that state's electoral votes; it gains no benefit from receiving additional votes above the margin necessary to win (this is true of 48 of the 50 states and the District of Columbia; the two exceptions, Maine and Nebraska, are explained below). This fact produces a very particular set of circumstances that explains the existence of swing states.
Since a campaign is interested in electoral votes, not popular votes, it tends to ignore states that it believes it will win easily; since it will win these without any effort, 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 easily expect to win Texas, which is a state that has a historically very conservative culture and a history of voting for Republican candidates; similarly, the same candidate can expect to lose Vermont, no matter how much campaigning is done in that state. The only states in which the campaign would target to spend time, money, and energy are those that could be won by either candidate. These are the swing states.
Only two states—Maine and Nebraska—violate this winner-take-all rule. They both have a slightly more complicated system for allocating their electoral votes. Under their system, two electoral votes go to the person who wins a plurality in the state, and a candidate gets one electoral vote for each congressional district in which they receive a plurality. Both of these states have relatively few electoral votes and are usually not considered swing states. Despite their different rules, neither has ever had a split electoral vote.
The actual procedures for deciding which states are swing states in any particular election varies across campaigns and across disciplines. Many political scientists use historical voting patterns: the more often a state has been won by candidates of one party in the past, the more likely it is to vote for that party in the future. Other factors that can help determine which states are swing states are:
The swing states of Illinois and New York were key to the outcome of the 1888 election. The swing states of Illinois and Texas were key to the outcome of the 1960 election. While the swing state of Florida received much press with regard to the outcome of the 2000 election, several other states had similarly close outcomes and could have changed the outcome of the election. Along with Florida, the difference in popular votes between the two major candidates was less than one percent in Iowa, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Oregon, and Wisconsin in 2000, all of which may be considered swing states for the 2004 election. In a recent article, the Washington Post defined swing states as those that were decided by less than 3 percentage points in the 2000 presidential election. Using those criteria, the swing states for 2004 are Oregon, New Mexico, Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, New Hampshire, and Florida.
Origin of swing states
Determining swing states
Swing states tend to have a fairly equitable balance of city and country-dwellers; states that are highly urban or highly rural are less likely to be swing states.Historical swing states
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