Probabilistic Quantification of Swing State Importance in the 2024 Electoral College
- 1Department of Statistics, Texas A&M University
Abstract
The winner of the United States presidential election is determined by which candidate is the first to reach 270 electoral votes. The winning candidate in most states can be reliably predicted in the months leading up to the election from historical trends and polling data. The remaining states are referred to as “battleground states” or “swing states”; these are the states which typically end up deciding the electoral winner. Campaigns are known to funnel a sizable portion of their finite resources (money, time, rallies, advertising, etc.) to these swing states in the months leading up to the election. Yet, to this point in time, very few mathematical procedures have been developed to quantify the influence of each swing state to a candidate’s election odds. In this paper, we focus on the seven tightest states for the 2024 presidential election and use conditional probabilities to quantify the importance each swing state has to each candidate’s probability of winning the electoral college. This methodology has the potential to serve as a guide for campaigns in the future, helping them determine how to allocate their limited amounts of time and resources to maximize their odds of winning the campaign.
Related
- Volatility-Corrected Prediction Intervals: Locally Adaptive Uncertainty Quantification for Probabilistic Time-Series Forecasting
- A Dynamic Model of Party Differentiation under Electoral Competition
- Health visibility in electoral candidate programs: Insights from the ballot box in an Arab Gulf country
- Restart Degeneration of the Swing Filter and a Simple Repair
- Just add noise: Debiasing tree-based variable importance in mixed data
BibTeX
@article{andros2026probabilistic,
title = {{Probabilistic Quantification of Swing State Importance in the 2024 Electoral College}},
author = {R. Jacob Andros and Rebecca Lee},
journal = {Statistics and Public Policy},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.1080/2330443x.2026.2754477},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1080/2330443x.2026.2754477},
note = {CC BY},
}
RIS
TY - JOUR
TI - Probabilistic Quantification of Swing State Importance in the 2024 Electoral College
AU - R. Jacob Andros
AU - Rebecca Lee
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/26
JO - Statistics and Public Policy
DO - 10.1080/2330443x.2026.2754477
UR - https://doi.org/10.1080/2330443x.2026.2754477
AB - The winner of the United States presidential election is determined by which candidate is the first to reach 270 electoral votes. The winning candidate in most states can be reliably predicted in the months leading up to the election from historical trends and polling data. The remaining states are referred to as “battleground states” or “swing states”; these are the states which typically end up deciding the electoral winner. Campaigns are known to funnel a sizable portion of their finite resources (money, time, rallies, advertising, etc.) to these swing states in the months leading up to the election. Yet, to this point in time, very few mathematical procedures have been developed to quantify the influence of each swing state to a candidate’s election odds. In this paper, we focus on the seven tightest states for the 2024 presidential election and use conditional probabilities to quantify the importance each swing state has to each candidate’s probability of winning the electoral college. This methodology has the potential to serve as a guide for campaigns in the future, helping them determine how to allocate their limited amounts of time and resources to maximize their odds of winning the campaign.
SN - 2330-443X
ER -