When it comes to presidential elections, some states seem to get all the attention.
When was the last time a presidential campaign fought to win your state?
Campaigns have targeted fewer and fewer states in recent elections, empowering a sliver of America’s voters.
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But it wasn’t always this way. Between 1952 and 2000, more than 20 states on average were targeted each year by the major party candidates.
The research, based on internal campaign documents, interviews with campaign leaders and media reports, shows a steep drop in the number of states that draw attention from candidates. The result: Campaigns have homed in on a smaller slice of American voters whose choices will determine the presidential outcome.
Pennsylvania, once again at the center of the contest in 2024, has been considered the most critical state, according to “Battleground: Electoral College Strategies, Execution, and Impact in the Modern Era,” a book published in August by political scientists Daron R. Shaw, Scott L. Althaus and Costas Panagopoulos.
The Keystone State drew the attention of Republicans every time in the past 18 presidential campaigns and all but one of those for Democrats. Michigan and Wisconsin are the other swing states that have been consistently targeted over the years by both campaigns.
By contrast, rightward-trending Ohio — long considered a swing state — was not targeted by either of the parties in the 2020 election and it is not expected to be a deciding state in 2024.
“There are the clusters of states that fall into the battleground category in consecutive elections, but these clusters shift and drift over time,” Althaus told The Washington Post, citing Illinois and California, which drew attention frequently before the 1990s.
“Across the 1952-2020 period, most states have been strategically prioritized multiple times. The only states to be consistently taken for granted are Hawaii, Rhode Island, Nebraska, Wyoming and the District of Columbia,” he said.
Arizona and Georgia, states drawing repeat candidate visits and advertising dollars this year, regained their battleground status in 2020.
Contrary to the campaigns’ strategy before the ’90s, when California and Texas used to be targeted by both parties, Panagopoulos explained that “state size seems to be less important today than it was in the past in terms of influencing battleground status, while competitiveness in the previous election is more important.”
“More than 80 percent of American voters will not be exposed to much of a direct campaign by the presidential candidates since resource targets are so concentrated to competitive states,” he said.
Kevin Uhrmacher contributed to this report.
