The 2024 elections could come down to one tipping point

As far as non-breaking news goes, the race for the White House in 2024 seems very close. Tellingly, the latest 538 presidential election prediction gives Vice President Kamala Harris the smallest advantage over former President Donald Trump: She wins in 57 out of 100 simulations, making it practically a coin-flipping race . Until then, the most critical swing states are all on a razor’s edge in the polls: Based on our latest polling averages, Harris is ahead by about 1 to 2 points in Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, while Trump is roughly a has a lead of 1. point edge in Arizona and Georgia, while North Carolina is essentially tied.

This group of battleground states will most likely give us the final “tipping point” in the 2024 presidential election. If we rank each state (and the congressional districts in Maine and Nebraska) based on how large the margin of victory is for that state’s winner – from the most Democratic to the most Republican, or vice versa – the tipping point is the battle that hands that state the winners. the winner of the Electoral College received the 270th electoral vote. That figure represents an outright majority of the current 538 electoral votes, which is what is needed for someone to win the presidential election.

Of course, every presidential election has a tipping point, whether it’s a landslide, where the tipping point is largely academic, or a nail-biter, where we keep a close eye on that state as a potential decider of the outcome – as could also be the case this year .

Looking at the 538 forecast, Pennsylvania is the most likely tipping point in all scenarios for the 2024 election. In 18 out of 100 cases, the Keystone State will deliver the winning electoral votes for Harris or Trump.* The next most likely tipping points are North Carolina, Michigan , Georgia and Florida, each of which has a 1 in 10 chance. fulfill that role. In addition, the remaining scenarios mainly concern Wisconsin, Arizona, Texas, Nevada and Minnesota, which serve as a tipping point.

Even more remarkable is that, considering how close this election is, its outcome could depend entirely on how the tipping point state votes – making that state a “decisive” tipping point. As a result, the 2024 election could be added to the short list of races absolutely determined by the outcome in that place – that is, contests in which neither candidate could win a majority in the Electoral College without capturing the tipping point .

Crucially, Pennsylvania’s importance remains critical in the smaller number of scenarios with a decisive tipping point event – ​​accounting for just over 1 in 8 scenarios in the 538 presidential forecast. Probabilistically, it is not very likely that an event with a about a 1 in 8 chance of happening, but it remains very plausible. For example, it’s about the same chance as tossing a coin three times and getting three heads in a row!

Of these more select cases, Pennsylvania has about a 17 in 100 chance of being the tipping point, followed by Michigan at about 14 in 100, North Carolina at 13 in 100, and Georgia at 11 in 100. These scenarios can permanently damage your cuticles. Please note that vote counting in Pennsylvania can be slow because election law prevents officials from starting processing ballots before 7 a.m. on Election Day. And in Georgia, Republicans in the state elections board have implemented rules to force cumbersome — and slower, more error-prone — manual counts of all votes in each precinct to check whether the total matches the machine count, though those changes face a legal challenge. until its implementation.

Regardless of the pace of the count, however, the campaigns and their allies know full well how vital these states, especially Pennsylvania, are to winning in November. By mid-September, Harris and pro-Harris groups had reserved about $76 million in ads in the Keystone State through Election Day, based on a recent AdImpact analysis, compared to about $61 million by Trump and pro-Trump outfits . That combined total of nearly $137 million accounted for more than a quarter of all ad bookings in the top seven swing states, with (appropriately) Michigan coming closest at just under a fifth (about $97 million combined). Pennsylvania has also hosted more presidential campaign events than any other state, according to VoteHub data, followed again by Michigan.

That Pennsylvania, Michigan or another key swing state could be particularly decisive positioned 2024 to potentially join a rare group of elections whose outcome rested solely on the tipping point state. That has been the case in only seven of the 39 presidential elections from 1868 to 2020: four consecutive elections from 1876 through 1888, another in 1916, and two more in 2000 and 2004. The 2000 race is actually known as the most close presidential election in history, as the The deciding state (Florida) was decided in favor of Republican George W. Bush by an absurdly small margin of 0.01 percentage points.

The 2000 election was controversial because of the vote in Florida, which amounted to only 537 votes out of a total of nearly 6 million votes cast there. That was partly due to the ballot design used in densely populated Palm Beach County, which caused some potential Democratic voters to accidentally cast their ballots for third-party candidate Pat Buchanan instead of Al Gore. Four years later, Bush won the Electoral College thanks to his two-point lead in Ohio, which, if reversed, would have given Democrat John Kerry an Electoral College victory—perhaps while also losing the national popular vote, which Bush won overall by more than two points (no Democrat has ever won the Electoral College while losing the popular vote). Consistent with these results, polls in both Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004 have been quite close in recent weeks in both states.

We have to look to the late 19th and early 20th centuries to find previous presidential contests decided by a single state. Even more controversial than the 2000 election, the 1876 election was marked by conflicting electoral returns, rampant suppression of strongly Republican black voters by white supremacist Democrats in the South, and the strategic rejection of election results by GOP election officials in three crucial Southern states—including the Tipping Point of South Carolina, which was decided by 0.5 points. The elections of 1880, 1884 and 1888 were also on a knife’s edge, with New York serving as a tipping point in both states at a time when it was the most populous state in the country. And in 1916, Democratic President Woodrow Wilson won reelection by the narrowest of margins, leading California by 0.4 points.

Returning to the 2024 race and the most likely state to decide it, the current median projection of the 538 forecast for Pennsylvania is for a 1-point win for Harris. To be clear, this falls between the broad extremes of the estimated range of outcomes in the state — a 15-point Democratic win to a 14-point Republican win — so we shouldn’t be surprised if Harris or Trump win the state by more than 1 point. But if a result in Pennsylvania were close to that margin, there is a real chance the Keystone State could join the ranks of decisive tipping point states.

Footnote

*The probabilities of turning points in this analysis are calculated based on the September 26 538 forecast.