The State of Texas has filed a lawsuit with the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that election 'flaws' make it impossible to know 'who legitimately won the 2020 election and threaten to cloud all future elections,” and therefore, the job of choosing electors should fall to (Republican) lawmakers in four swing states. With the first polls having just closed, betting odds for the election results in swing states are starting to shift. Current US Presidential Election odds project that Joe Biden will win the Oval.

From one presidential election to the next, the battleground states that make — or break — the election remain largely the same. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t gradual (and sometimes, not so gradual) shifts underway. We zoomed in on how 16 battleground states have voted relative to the country as a whole since 2000 — or how much more Republican or Democratic they are relative to the nation1For instance, Hillary Clinton won the national popular vote by about 2 points in 2016, but President Trump won Florida by about 1 point in the same election, so Florida was about 3 points more Republican than the country. — and we found an electoral map undergoing a series of changes, some steady and others abrupt.

How much more Republican- or Democratic-leaning a state’s popular vote was than the national popular vote in presidential elections, and how the state is forecasted to vote in 2020, as of Aug. 25

Take Iowa and Ohio, which went from uber-competitive states to near blowouts for President Trump in 2016. Or Maine and Michigan, which hadn’t been all that competitive in 2008 or 2012, but lurched to the right in 2016. In other words, 2016 marked a significant departure from how these states had voted in recent years; each state swung 7 points or more to the right, the biggest swings in that election.

One explanation for why these four states moved so suddenly to the right is that they each have a large share of voters (at least 55 percent2Of the population age 25 years or older.) who are non-Hispanic white with less than a bachelor’s degree, a bloc that moved sharply toward the GOP in 2016. Additionally, Iowa and Maine rank among the most rural states in the country, which is another predictor of GOP-leaning politics. FiveThirtyEight’s forecast currently expects these states to step slightly to the left in 2020, but there’s a lot of uncertainty here, especially in a state like Maine where the error bars are particularly large. The next five states also shifted to the right in 2016, but they didn’t veer quite as far as the previous four did.

How much more Republican- or Democratic-leaning a state’s popular vote was than the national popular vote in presidential elections, and how the state is forecasted to vote in 2020, as of Aug. 25

One reason why these states didn’t lurch as far to the right is that four of them3Minnesota, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. have at least one large metropolitan area that votes heavily Democratic. This offsets the rest of those states, which usually vote far more Republican. However, as was true in the first four states we looked at, there has been a slow yet noticeable move to the right in these four states over the last several elections. FiveThirtyEight’s forecast anticipates that some of these states, like New Hampshire and Wisconsin, might bounce back slightly to the left in 2020, but also that others, like Minnesota, may continue to shift to the right.

On the other end of the spectrum, some 2020 battleground states moved to the left — considerably so — in the last election. These states predominantly lie in the South and West, and the following trio of traditionally red states could all be up for grabs this November.

How much more Republican- or Democratic-leaning a state’s popular vote was than the national popular vote in presidential elections, and how the state is forecasted to vote in 2020, as of Aug. 25

Arizona, Georgia and Texas all moved at least 4 points to the left in 2016, and it’s possible they’ll move even farther in 2020. After all, the 2018 midterm elections showed these states could elect Democrats statewide, or at least, come very close. Democrats won a U.S. Senate seat in Arizona for the first time since 1988, while Republicans only narrowly won Texas’s Senate race and Georgia’s gubernatorial contest.

What explains the leftward shift in these traditionally Republican states? For one thing, these states are more racially and ethnically diverse than most of the other states we’ve looked at — Arizona and Texas have large Hispanic populations, for instance, while Georgia has a sizable Black electorate — and people of color tend to vote more Democratic. But these fairly urban states have also seen their major metropolitan areas such as Atlanta, Dallas, Houston and Phoenix become increasingly Democratic because of the surge in college-educated voters. At present, the FiveThirtyEight forecast anticipates these states will lean similar to how they did 2016, although further shifts to the left are plausible.

Swing State Odds Game

For Democrats, the hope would be that those three states trend in ways similar to Colorado and Virginia, two formerly red states whose diverse and highly educated electorates have moved them to the left over the past two decades.

How much more Republican- or Democratic-leaning a state’s popular vote was than the national popular vote in presidential elections, and how the state is forecasted to vote in 2020, as of Aug. 25

Colorado’s population is about one-fifth Hispanic and Virginia’s is about one-fifth Black, and both are only about two-thirds white. And white voters in these states are more likely to hold at least a four-year college degree than in the other states we’ve examined. Driven by increasingly Democratic vote shares in suburban and urban areas — especially around Denver and Washington, D.C. — Colorado and Virginia have moved far enough to the left that, in an environment in which Joe Biden leads by about 9 points nationally, they lie at the periphery of the competitive states.

That said, Florida and North Carolina are also racially diverse and home to a decent number of highly educated voters, but they haven’t become liberal bastions. Instead, they have tended to vote a bit to the right of the country with little variation in recent years.

How much more Republican- or Democratic-leaning a state’s popular vote was than the national popular vote in presidential elections, and how the state is forecasted to vote in 2020, as of Aug. 25

Florida is a hard state to categorize politically. It has an elderly population that usually leans toward the GOP, but it also has a large Hispanic and Black population that leans Democratic -- with the caveat that a large share of its Latino vote is Cuban American, a group that has shifted toward Democrats over the last decade but remains far more Republican-leaning than other groups of Latinos. North Carolina is also a swing state, even though it has a fairly consistent Republican lean. North Carolina’s white college-educated population share isn’t that much smaller than Virginia’s, but it has a larger share of white voters who don’t have a four-year degree. Additionally, North Carolina’s white voters are somewhat more Republican-leaning, and the state tends to be more rural than Virginia. As things stand, the forecast model expects these states to vote more or less like they did in 2016 — so they’ll be as competitive as ever.

This is all to say that 2020 will be a pivotal year in understanding underlying trends within the Electoral College. Will states like Iowa or Ohio move further to the right? Georgia and Texas further to the left? Or should we expect more of a reversion to the mean? Suffice it to say that, with Trump on the ballot this November, many of the forces we saw in 2016 will be prevalent again in 2020. But those forces may also define the parties moving forward, which means this election could also tell us a great deal about how the electoral map will look beyond 2020.

At a rally in Georgia, President Donald Trump continued to make baseless claims about the 2020 election being “rigged,” drawing false comparisons at one point between President-elect Joe Biden’s performance in swing states and that of the last two Democratic presidential nominees:

• Trump said Biden beat Hillary Clinton “in the swing states, but she beat him everywhere else.” That’s false. Biden outperformed Clinton in every state — not just swing states.
• He also wrongly said “President Obama beat Biden all over the country, except in some of the swing states.” When comparing the candidates by percentage of total votes, Obama did better than Biden in most states, including four of the six swing states being contested by Trump. And Biden would still win the presidency without the two other contested states.

The president visited Valdosta, Georgia, on Dec. 5 to campaign for the state’s two Republican senators who were forced into runoff elections against their Democratic challengers. But the president spent most of his 90-minute speech repeating false, misleading and unsupported claims about the election that he made just a few days earlier in an online video that he billed as perhaps “the most important speech I’ve ever made.”

At the rally, Trump insisted that he won Georgia (“You know we won Georgia, just so you understand”) and Wisconsin (“Well, actually I won Wisconsin”) — even though bothstates have certified Biden as the winner after recounts. Georgia counted its ballots three times.

Trump also repeated bogus claims about secret, illegal ballot “dumps” in bothstates that we have already debunked. This time, the president suggested that the ballot “dumps” explain what he described as a “very interesting” and “statistically impossible” anomaly in some swing states won by Biden. (His campaign has gone to court to challenge the results in Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada and Arizona.)

After correctly noting that he won Florida, Ohio, South Carolina and Iowa, the president said this:

Trump, Dec. 5: And we won all over the place. And many of these swing states, you know, it’s a very interesting statistic. President Obama beat Biden all over the country, except in some of the swing states where Biden beat him badly. How does that work? And they say it’s statistically impossible. He beat crooked Hillary. Think of this. He beat crooked Hillary in the swing states, but she beat him everywhere else. Let me tell you, this election was rigged.

All of that is wrong.

“There is no such thing as a ‘statistical impossibility,’ for starters,” Charles Stewart III, a political science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told us in an email.

Biden vs. Clinton

Using Dave Leip’s Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections, we looked at the 2016 results and found that Biden outperformed Clinton in every state — not just swing states – both by the number and the percentage of votes. (The unofficial 2020 results were as of Dec. 8.)

Stewart said he prefers comparing candidates by percentage of votes, but without minor party candidates’ vote totals. By that measure, we found Clinton outperformed Biden in only six states (California, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Nevada and New York) and Washington, D.C. Only one of them — Nevada — is a swing state where Trump has been contesting the results. Clinton barely edged Biden there, garnering 51.29% of the Nevada vote, compared with Biden’s 51.22%.

In his own analysis of the 2020 and 2016 elections for us, Stewart said he found “what political scientists would call a ‘uniform swing’ for Biden nationwide,” with some minor variations.

“[T]he way elections work, it would be unlikely a winning candidate would do better (compared to 4 years before) in only the close states and not the uncompetitive states,” Stewart said.

Stewart provided this scatterplot that shows a “uniform swing” toward Biden.

“There are 51 circles, one for each state plus DC. The diagonal line is where every state would be if the vote share for Biden = the vote share for Clinton,” Stewart said, explaining his chart. “As you can see, the circles are sitting mostly right on top of the line, which is consistent with Biden being just a few points ahead of Clinton in almost all the states.”

By any measure, Trump’s wrong to say that Clinton beat Biden everywhere, except swing states.

Biden vs. Obama

We also reviewed the 2012 and 2008 election results and found that Barack Obama did have a higher percentage of the total vote than Biden in most states: 29 states in 2012 and 37 states (plus Washington, D.C.) in 2008. But Obama also did better than Biden in four of the six swing states now being contested by Trump — Wisconsin, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania — in 2008 and 2012. As a percentage of the vote, Biden did better than Obama only in Georgia and Arizona — two other states where Trump is contesting the results.

However, even without the electoral votes in Georgia (16) and Arizona (11), Biden would still have enough electoral votes to beat Trump. The unofficial election results show Biden with 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232. It takes 270 electoral votes to become president.

By vote totals, Biden did better than Obama in nearly all states — although that’s not surprising since there were also far more people who voted in 2020 (158,507,629) than had voted eight years ago in 2012 (129,237,642) and 12 years ago in 2008 (131,473,705):

• 2012: Biden received more votes than Obama did in 2012 in all but five states – Mississippi, Iowa, North Dakota, Ohio, West Virginia. Biden did better than Obama in all the swing states that Trump has been contesting: Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada, Arizona and Georgia.
• 2008: Biden received more votes than Obama did in 2008 in all but 11 states. Obama did better in two swing states that Trump has been contesting: Michigan and Wisconsin.

So, no matter how one looks at the election results, Trump is also wrong to say that “President Obama beat Biden all over the country, except in some of the swing states.”

Swing State Odds Calculator

By total votes, Biden did better than Obama in most states, including swing states. By vote percentage, Obama did better than Biden in most states, including in most swing states.

Once again, the president is peddling false information that fails to support his baseless claim that the election was “rigged.”

Swing State Odds

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Swing State Watchis an occasional series about false and misleading political messages in key states that will help decide the 2020 presidential election.

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