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Where will the 2024 presidential race happen?
A few key battleground states will be the center of major candidates’ focus. They will be large states.
In the Electoral College system, each state elects or appoints a slate of electors; the electors then in turn vote for a president. Because different states have different combinations of cultural and economic interests, they fall in different places along a political spectrum. Presidential candidates rarely get similar levels of support across the entire country.
States to the far left or right of the American political spectrum are generally not competitive in a presidential election. For example, even though we don’t know which candidates will run in 2028, it is very likely that a Democratic candidate will win Hawaii and a Republican candidate will win Wyoming — and that no major presidential candidate will hold any campaign events in either state.
It is also likely that a majority of the presidential campaign will be focused sharply on a handful of key battleground states. In most recent presidential election cycles, more than half of all major campaign events were held in four states, and more than half of all advertising dollars were spent in markets that included those four states.
