Long, long ago, sometime in the spring or early summer of 2016, I remember seeing John King on CNN. He was, true to form, standing in front of the Magic Wall, discussing how Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin could hand Trump the presidency. It was prescient, to say the least, even though I’m sure many watching were dismissive at the time (confession: I was very much in that group).
Even with all the uncertainty surrounding 2024 and how this fall’s presidential election might play out, I do think the specific Electoral College map that Trump could win with is fairly straightforward. It’s also a bit under-discussed, perhaps because folks assume that Trump will flip most, if not all, of the battleground states if he does end up winning.
But given the educational polarization that has come to define American politics, I’m skeptical that Trump (or Biden) will achieve a clean sweep of the battleground states. More likely, Trump and Biden will split them, with college attainment being a key predictor of where these states ultimately land.
Down the road, I plan to look individually at the key states that will likely decide the election (and to explain why I feel that a few of them will remain blue), but for this post, I’ll speak broadly about the three that Trump is in a good position to flip. They are Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. The presence of the latter two should surprise no one, but Nevada might turn some heads.
As much as these three states differ demographically (though PA and WI are fairly similar states, and have voted the same way in every presidential election since 1992), they all share one very important thing: they have a lower percentage of adults with a college degree than the nation as a whole.
For inquiring minds, in the US as a whole, 34.3% of Americans 25 or older have at least a bachelor’s degree, based on 2018-2022 American Community Survey data from the Census Bureau. PA is slightly below that figure (33.8%), whle Wisconsin is right at 32%. And Nevada? Surprisingly, it’s only at 26.5%.
The educational profile of these states helps explain how they’ve trended since 2012. PA and WI have gone from voting slightly more Democratic than the US as a whole to being about 3 to 4 points redder than the country. As for Nevada, after being a few points bluer than the country in 2012, it voted right in line with the national popular vote in 2016, and then got about 2.5 points redder in relative terms in 2020 (since its margin was basically unchanged from 2016 to 2020, while the US got about 2.5 points bluer).
In short, all three states have trended Republican since the emergence of Trump, though not as dramatically as, say, Iowa and Ohio. But NV, PA, and WI are, at their core, best thought of as working class states (though PA slightly less so), and ones where Trump will almost certainly improve on his 2020 margins.
Does that mean that all three will flip red in 2024? Not necessarily. But if we somehow knew right now that Trump would win this fall, I’d assume with moderate confidence that he flipped these three states, and perhaps nothing else. And yes, he would have to flip all three; even coming up short in Nevada (which only has 6 electoral votes) would leave Trump just shy of 270, the magic number of electoral votes (this is assuming Biden held onto all of his other 2020 states).
Very likely, Nevada will be the subject of my next post, so stay tuned!