The United States has a unique system for electing a president, the Electoral College. In modern times, it has handed disproportionate voting power to a few states that are fairly evenly divided politically.
This forces campaigns to spend most of their money on so-called battleground states. There are seven this year: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
The lack of attention to other states leaves voters in much of the country feeling like they and the issues they care about are being overlooked in the presidential race.
American voters do not choose their president directly through popular vote. When they vote, they are technically voting for a slate of electors who will then vote for president and vice president on a specific day in December.
Almost all states have laws requiring electors to vote for the winner of their state’s popular vote, but this does not mean that the presidential candidate who receives the most votes in the Electoral College is the one favored by the majority of voters.
In two of the last six U.S. presidential elections, candidates lost the national popular vote but won the presidency. That includes former President Donald Trump, who lost the popular vote to Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016 by nearly 2.9 million but still won enough Electoral College votes to become president.
This often seems crazy to people who live in democracies in the rest of the world. The United States is the only country with a system in which voters select an electoral body whose sole function is to choose the president. In most other democracies, the president is elected directly by the popular will of voters.
Each state’s number of presidential electors is equal to the number of its representatives in the United States House of Representatives and Senate. This benefits small states and sets the stage for presidential elections to depend largely on a handful of swing states.
A presidential candidate must win a majority of the 538 total electoral votes to win (the District of Columbia gets three). Most states use a system in which all voters cast their votes for the state’s popular winner. Maine and Nebraska are the exceptions, awarding theirs on a proportional basis.
The Electoral College encourages presidential campaigns to concentrate visits and spending on a small number of swing states.
This year’s presidential battleground states represent 18% of the nation’s population but have dominated the attention of Democratic and Republican presidential candidates and their running mates.
Through Tuesday, Democratic and Republican tickets saw just over 200 campaign stops in total, three-quarters of them in the seven battleground states, according to a database of campaign events based on reports from ‘Associated Press. Pennsylvania alone was visited 41 times, the most of any state. AP data shows Michigan is second, with 31 visits through Tuesday, followed closely by Wisconsin, with 27. The rest: North Carolina, 18; Nevada, 13; and Arizona and Georgia with 12 visits each.
But it’s not just about state visits: Presidential campaigns tailor their presence to specific countries they believe are critical to their success. The AP database shows that campaign events in these seven states were concentrated in counties with 22.7 million registered voters, or just 10% of all registered voters nationally for the election presidential election this year.
The lack of attention from presidential candidates is keenly felt in places like Waukegan, Illinois, a majority-Latino working-class city that has struggled with factories closing and its infrastructure deteriorating. waterfront. With the exception of an occasional fundraiser in Chicago, Illinois is largely bypassed by presidential candidates because it reliably votes Democratic.
Its northern neighbor, Wisconsin, is popular ground for presidential candidates.
The last time a presidential candidate set foot in Waukegan was when former President Donald Trump landed at its airport in 2020. He left Air Force One, gave a single wave and immediately got into an SUV heading to Kenosha, Wisconsin.
But in Racine, a similarly sized Wisconsin city just 50 miles north of Waukegan, Trump held a rally in June near a harbor overlooking Lake Michigan, where he welcomed development along the shores of the lake, spoke about revitalization efforts in Racine and Milwaukee. metropolitan area, and stressed the importance of their constituents in his bid to return to the White House. Just a month earlier, before dropping out of the race, President Joe Biden praised a new Microsoft center in Racine County during a campaign stop in the city.
Waukegan residents say they feel lost in the national debate during the presidential election and wish they could also be on the candidates’ radar.
“It’s not so much the candidates that are at issue, but rather the undemocratic electoral college,” said Matt Muchowkshi, chairman of the Waukegan Township Democratic Party. “It is frustrating that the votes of some voters count for more, and they dismiss and discredit the votes of more urban voters and voters of color.”
___
Associated Press multimedia journalist Kevin S. Vineys in Washington contributed to this report.
___
The Associated Press receives support from several private foundations to improve its explanatory coverage of elections and democracy. To learn more about AP’s democracy initiative, click here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
