With less than a year from the close of the 2024 presidential election, most people think the political landscape could not be more uncertain. Will Trump secure the GOP nomination? Will Biden remain on the Democratic ticket? Will Robert F. Kennedy Jr. get his name on the ballot in all states, or at least those that matter? Will No Labels field a unity ticket? Will Trump’s indictments (which most see as politically motivated) lead to convictions, and will Hunter Biden’s corruption investigations bludgeon his father’s chances?
As conservatives, it’s fun to think about the political earthquake a Biden dropout would cause. That’s unlikely to happen and our latest national poll shows the Democrats’ most viable back up, California Governor Gavin Newsom, is well, not that viable. In a matchup with Trump, he loses by six points and trails with Independent voters by 11 points.
These are big variables. Any mixture of outcomes could drastically change the dynamics of the election. In search of a constant variable, this election really comes down to the tale of two electoral maps based on a new set of battleground states. In previous elections, Republicans eyed states like Ohio, Colorado, New Hampshire, and Florida as battlegrounds ripe for potential victory. The legacy battleground architecture remained relatively unchanged during the globalization years between the George H.W. Bush and Barack Obama presidencies.
Trump’s candidacy changed that.
While 160 million people might vote in this November’s election, only about 50,000 voters spread throughout a new battleground map consisting of Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, and Wisconsin, will decide the next occupant of the White House.
Except for Nevada, each of these new battleground states went for Trump in 2016 but flipped to Biden in 2020. Since, Ohio and Florida moved solidly red and are reliably Republican in 2024, mostly because of Trump. Pennsylvania and Wisconsin fueled Trump’s win in 2016 with the “forgotten men and women” constituency bucking both the country club Republicans and urban elitist progressives. These were states Trump truly moved into the ‘tossup’ column where Republicans before him could not…
Read the full op-ed by Cygnal Pollster & Director of Political Strategy Mitch Brown in Townhall: https://townhall.com/columnists/mitch-brown/2023/12/29/these-five-states-and-50000-voters-will-decide-americas-future-n2632949