The outcome of an expected closely contested 2024 presidential election likely will be determined by eight battleground states, the Washington Examiner reported.
With 270 Electoral College votes needed to win, and based on recent national elections, a race that currently appears to be destined between former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden likely will come down to the following states: Arizona (11 electoral votes), Georgia (16), Michigan (15), New Hampshire (4), Nevada (6), North Carolina (16), Pennsylvania (19), and Wisconsin (10).
Each of those swing areas contains a sizable block of independent voters who likely will decide the state’s ultimate result, the Examiner reported Friday.
Most of middle America, including Texas (40) and Ohio (17), and Florida (30) are included among states that lean GOP. California (54), New York (28), and Virginia (13) lean Democrat, the Examiner noted.
In 2016, Trump's victory over Democrat rival Hillary Clinton was decided by about 77,000 votes out of 136 million ballots cast. He won Pennsylvania by 0.7 percentage points (44,292 votes), Wisconsin by 0.7 points (22,748 votes), and Michigan by 0.2 points (10,704 votes), the Examiner reported.
In 2020, Biden defeated Trump by winning a handful of states. Roughly 44,000 votes in Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin averted a 269-269 Electoral College tie, which likely would have meant Trump's reelection, the Examiner reported.
The 2024 election also figures to be a nailbiter.
Democrats start off with an advantage in Pennsylvania, which showed 500,000 more registered Democrats than Republicans in its annual voter registration report for 2022.
"It's hard right now in Pennsylvania to see a path to victory for Trump in 2024 in the general election," Christopher Nicholas, a veteran Republican political consultant, told the Examiner.
For Republicans to win Arizona, the infighting between Trump's MAGA backers and supporters of the late Arizona Sen. John McCain would likely need to stop.
"The swing constituency in Arizona are people who like John McCain, and you can't win that state if the people who like John McCain are voting for Joe Biden or the Democrats," GOP consultant Ron Nehring, a former California Republican Party chairman, told the Examiner.
In Georgia, both major parties have hopes of prevailing. Republican Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger easily won in 2022, but Democrats hold both U.S. Senate seats.
"I think the question going into 2024 is whether or not the 2020 results [which Biden won] were an outlier," said Andra Gillespie, a political science professor at Emory University. "If it is Trump versus Biden, I think the assumption is that there's a sliver of Georgia Republicans [who] find him problematic and will abstain from voting for president."
Michigan is one state in which Democrats worry about a possible third-party candidate taking votes from Biden.
The Examiner reported that North Carolina could be trending away from the Republican Party and might be on its way to becoming a "true purple state," according to Democrat consultant Christopher Hahn, a former top aide to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.
In Nevada, the Examiner said that the GOP nominee likely will need to make inroads with suburban voters to flip the state in 2024.
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