Why Presidential Candidates Care About Some Votes So Much More than Others

There’s a ritualistic flow to each election cycle: the two political parties jockey over who will be their presidential nominee, then coalesce around the winner; the nominees craft their platform to attract a broad set of voters; and inevitably, at some point it becomes very important for the candidate to take a position on fracking,– wait, what? Fracking? That sounds like a pretty niche issue. Why is it such a big deal for a presidential campaign? Well, it just so happens that fracking is a big deal in Pennsylvania, and sorry, their votes matter a lot more than yours, (probably, depending on where you live.)

Why the imbalance? It all has to do with the “winner take all” method by which a state’s electoral votes are awarded to a presidential candidate. With the exception of Nebraska and Maine, earning 49% of the votes in a state awards the candidate 0 electoral votes, while earning 51% of the votes awards the candidate 100% of that state’s electoral votes. That means that once a candidate is winning in a state by a safe margin per the polls, it doesn’t make any sense to spend resources winning additional votes in that state. By the same token, it is much more worthwhile for a candiate to try to close a narrow gap in a “swing state” than it is to try to close a large gap in a less competitive state, even if closing that large gap would mean a larger number of voters turning out for that candidate.

Since I live in California, Kamala Harris isn’t as interested in convincing me to vote for her, (though I need no convincing,) because it’s much more critical for her to earn people’s votes in Nevada, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, and Michican, the “swing states” of this year. So, to feel like I’m making more of an impact, in addition to voting for my preferred candidate, I donate to campaigns and post on social media, as well as remind myself that there are also a lot of important state-wide and local candidates and issues to vote on, too.

But if you’re in a swing state, how would that be? For any of you living in these states, you can have a huge impact! You have no excuse not to vote! Now’s your chance! To illustrate the influence you can have on an election in a swing state, I created a graph that estimates how much of an impact your vote can have relative to the one I cast in California.

The graph uses 2024 polling data to estimate the predicted gap in percentage of votes between the two candidates, and combines that with voter turnout data from the last election (2020) to predict the gap in number of votes between the two candidates. The smaller the gap, the bigger difference a vote can make to swing 100% of that state’s electoral votes from one candidate to the other. That impact is then multiplied by the number of electoral votes at stake for that state. The mathy representation of this calculation looks like this:

                                1 vote
Vote Impact = ------------------------------------------------ x State Electoral Votes
              (predicted % margin) x (predicted # total votes)

A couple disclaimers:

• To get an accurate prediction of the number of total votes, you might expect that I’d adjust the 2020 voter turnout numbers based on population growth/decline in the state between 2020 and 2023. To save time, I did not do this, so the voter impact for each state might be slightly inflated, (or deflated, if a state experienced population decline), though I don’t think it would be enough to significantly change the overall picture.
• Not all states have good polling data, especially those who favor a particular candidate with wide margins, (because neither candidates nor pollsters really care about them!) For many of these states lacking polling data, I took what polling data I could find, and just made up a number that looked close enough to what I saw, usually 60/40, providing a 20% margin. States that were closer than 60/40, though generally had pretty good polling data, or at least enough for 270toWin or FiveThirtyEight to create a poling average from.

The takeaway here is that if you live in Nevada, which is extremely close in the polls, your vote will have roughly 115 times the impact of my vote in California! Pennsylvania (74x), Wisconsin (61x), Arizona (32x), Georgia (28x), North Carolina (21x), and Michigan (15x) are all up there as well. If you live in one of these states, my message to you as a Californian is that you really are special! Recognize your elevated status in determining the future of our country! Go out and VOTE!!

Some links for more details on the electoral college:

• A great podcast episode from RadioLab on the electoral college
• Video explaining how you could with the presidency with only 22% of the popular vote