US election: These swing states will decide whether Trump or Harris wins

All the current polling in the US presidential election sends the same message: Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump are essentially tied in the national vote.

While a few surveys put one or the other ahead, their results generally fall within the margin of error.

However, because of the US’ Electoral College system, the election will be decided not by the national popular vote but by the combination of states each of the candidates wins.

As in every election, only a handful of states are truly competitive this year, and thus get the bulk of the campaigns’ attention in the race’s final weeks as the two sides seek an advantage in a handful of flippable places.

In the last two elections, some of these states were decided by just tens of thousands of votes out of millions cast, meaning either Harris or Trump could end up winning by tiny margins, whichever way the overall national vote goes.

Based on recent elections and current polling evidence, there are seven states definitively in play — plus some longer shots that might just deliver a surprise.

1. Arizona — the one where difference is counted in hundreds

11 electoral votes

2016: Trump +3.5%

2020: Biden +0.3%

On election night 2020, Republican-friendly Fox News enraged the Trump campaign by becoming the first major network to call Arizona for Joe Biden.

It took several days for most other outlets to agree on a definitive result, and Biden’s margin of victory was strikingly small: fewer than 10,500 votes out of nearly 3.4 million cast.

This result was all the more stunning because no Democrat had won the state since Bill Clinton in 1996. While the Democrats had seen some success in statewide races, talk of the state’s demographics shifting in their favour had yet to result in a presidential victory, though the state did move their way in 2016.

Democratic candidates won both the governor’s race and held one of its Senate seats in 2022, indicating that the party’s base and voter turnout operations in the state remain strong. But while Harris has been campaigning in the state, it is still considered one of the hardest of Biden’s pickups for her to hang on to.

Still, two parallel elections may help her cling on.

A Senate race to fill the seat being vacated by Democrat-turned-independent Kyrsten Sinema looks likely to go the Democrats’ way, with Arizona’s Republicans nominating a notoriously unpopular hardcore Trumpist in the form of failed gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake.

More importantly yet, Arizona is one of 10 states where voters will be able to weigh in on abortion rights via a ballot measure.

When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade and thus eliminated women’s federal right to an abortion, Arizona reverted to a draconian 19th-century law banning it in almost all circumstances.

Pro-choice campaigners are now organising to support a measure that would enshrine the right to an abortion up to the point of foetal viability in the state’s constitution — and that get-out-the-vote effort will almost certainly drive up turnout among Harris-sympathetic voters.

2. Georgia — the one where victory was falsely claimed

16 electoral votes

2016: Trump +5.13%

2020: Biden +0.23%

Joe Biden’s extremely narrow victory in Georgia was another stunning defeat for Trump in 2020, and the state immediately became one of the former president’s top targets in his campaign to overturn the election result.

Members of Trump’s legal team have since faced legal action for their actions in the state — notably attacks on two nonpartisan election workers — and Trump himself is facing a state criminal case alleging that he tried to improperly interfere with the result by pressuring state officials.

The case rests in part on an infamous phone call made ahead of the 6 January insurrection in which Trump falsely claimed to have won, voiced false claims about electoral interference, and asked the secretary of state to “find” the 12,000-odd votes that would have been needed to flip the election his way.

With a diverse population and growing urban areas, Georgia has been demographically trending the Democrats’ way for some time, and it now boasts two Democratic senators.

Nonetheless, the closeness of the 2020 result and the installation of Trump loyalists on the State Election Board has left Harris no room for complacency.

Georgia was recently hit hard by Hurricane Helene, leading Republican Governor Brian Kemp to declare a state of emergency in all the state’s counties.

The aftermath has been marked by intense misinformation about the Biden-Harris administration’s response to the disaster, but Kemp has credited the president with being open to his requests for aid.

3. Michigan — the one that helped Trump win once

15 electoral votes

2016: Trump +0.23%

2020: Biden +2.78%

Along with Pennsylvania and Wisconsin (more on which below), Michigan was one of the three states that delivered Trump his 2016 electoral college victory, moving into the Republican column for the first time since 1988.

Part of the reason he defeated Hillary Clinton in the state was the slightly depressed turnout among Democratic-leaning voters in the state’s largest city, Detroit. After Biden recaptured it with a 2.78-point margin of victory in 2020, Harris is hopeful of keeping the state in the Democratic column via high voter turnout in a city that remains a party stronghold.

She is also counting on voters being turned off by highly negative messaging from her rival. In a recent speech to the Detroit Economic Club, Trump repeated lines he has used before about the city — once notorious for crime and urban decay — and invoking it as a warning to the entire US.

Naturally, the Harris campaign has cropped Trump’s words and other statements into a campaign ad, albeit one with a positive spin.

4. Nevada — the one held by the Democrats (mostly)

6 electoral votes

2016: Clinton +2.42%

2020: Biden +2.39%

The only one of this year’s swing states to have voted for both Clinton and Biden, Nevada has not gone Republican since 2004.

It has been looked to as a crucial swing state in every year since, its standing elevated by an early slot in both parties’ presidential primary calendars and a series of hotly contested Senate races — including one this year.

The key to winning Nevada is the state’s large Hispanic population, a constituency that in recent presidential cycles has broken heavily in favour of Democrats. There are signs in recent polling that despite his long history of extreme racial rhetoric against immigrants from Latin America, Trump has made inroads with this bloc, and particularly with male voters.

Both he and Harris have been explicitly reaching out to Latinos in recent events, but their pitches are very different.

Where Harris is pushing a message focused on economic opportunity and balancing border security with fair treatment of immigrants, Trump recently held a Hispanic outreach roundtable in Las Vegas at which he railed against the US’s supposed catastrophic decline and claimed Democrats want to ban cows.

While Biden’s victory in 2020 was marginally narrower than Clinton’s in 2016, Nevada’s Democrats do have an entrenched organisational advantage. Nevada was the home of the late Democratic Senator Harry Reid, who led his party in Congress’s upper chamber for the bulk of the Obama administration.

The so-called “Reid Machine” via which he organised the Democratic vote in the state is still considered one of the most effective campaign operations in the US — as evidenced by the fact the state still has two Democratic Senators, one of whom is generally expected to win her re-election race this year.

Trump, meanwhile, has a long history of business dealings in Las Vegas, where he still operates a hotel.

5. North Carolina — the (only) one that voted for Trump twice

16 electoral votes

2016: Trump +3.66%

2020: Trump +48.59%

The only swing state drawing national attention that voted for Trump twice, North Carolina is perhaps the archetypal purple state. While it has a Democratic governor, it has two Republican senators; it last voted for a Democratic president in 2008, but has been a closely fought state since Obama’s win.

With thriving business, education and science and technology sectors, North Carolina is home to a large number of students and younger workers whose values align far more closely with Harris than with Trump.

At the same time, many elected state lawmakers are highly conservative. North Carolina has imposed one of the country’s most extreme abortion bans, forbidding women from terminating their pregnancies after 12 weeks — a point before which many do not even realise they are pregnant — and as elsewhere, the outrage at the rollback of fundamental rights has galvanised Democratic voters.

Like Georgia, North Carolina was badly hit by Hurricane Helene, with even inland western areas of the state suffering devastating flooding.

The resulting chaos makes the state harder than usual to poll or travel through in the last weeks of the election, meaning it will be harder to know what will happen than in most of the other battlegrounds.

6. Pennsylvania — the one to rule them all

19 electoral votes

2016: Trump +0.72%

2020: Biden +1.17%

Hillary Clinton’s loss in Pennsylvania effectively ended her hopes of becoming president, despite her having campaigned heavily there right up until the night before the election.

A perennial swing state, Pennsylvania is home to two strongly Democratic cities, Pittsburgh in the west and Philadelphia in the east, with a far more conservative centre of rural communities and post-industrial towns that have trended Republican in recent decades.

The generally accepted model of a Democratic presidential victory in Pennsylvania is to run up large margins in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia and win the battle for the latter’s more moderate suburbs.

Trump’s strength, however, has been in driving up turnout in less urban areas of the state that Harris will struggle to win over, meaning she will have to clear a high bar in her party’s traditional strongholds.

7. Wisconsin — the one where Hillary’s hopes went to die

10 electoral votes

2016: Trump +0.77%

2020: Biden +0.63%

Wisconsin was the third of the three Republican pickups that doomed Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Like Michigan, part of the reason for her defeat — by fewer than 23,000 votes — was a relatively poor showing in urban Milwaukee and Madison, while Trump ran up high margins in rural areas. In 2020, Biden was able to boost his margins in both cities.

Like most of this year’s swing states, Wisconsin was heavily targeted by the Trump legal team in their effort to overturn the election, but to no avail. And like several others, it is also host to a Senate race, with Democrat Tammy Baldwin defending her usually safe seat.

The presidential candidates have both got Wisconsin firmly in their sights. It was there that Harris held her first rally this summer after stepping in to replace Biden as the Democratic candidate, and the Republicans held their convention in Milwaukee.

Harris later appeared in the arena they had used for that event to give a speech that was beamed live into her own convention in Chicago.

The wildcards

It is far from impossible that election night could throw up a surprise.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton’s two narrowest wins were in New Hampshire and Minnesota, two states the Democrats have won repeatedly for some time.

Neither is thought to be seriously in play this year — not least because the latter’s popular governor, Tim Walz, has joined Harris as her running mate — but Clinton’s experience shows that the pecking order of safe states cannot be taken for granted.

Meanwhile, there have been polls showing that Harris is competitive in former swing states that were thought to have been fully lost to the Democrats.

One survey put her only four points behind in Iowa, last won by Obama in 2012, while numerous polls give Trump a lead of as little as five points in electoral vote-rich Ohio. She even appears to be running him relatively close in Florida, effectively his home state and another place the Democrats fell short in the last two elections.

However, there are enough ultra-close swing states to campaign in that the Harris team is unlikely to expend time and resources chasing unlikely wins — a mistake made by in 2016 by Clinton, who late in the election turned her campaign’s attention to the ultimately unwinnable Texas.

Meanwhile, it briefly looked like the Republicans might score a breakthrough in Nebraska by pressuring state legislators to change the state’s voting system, under which it allocates its electoral votes by congressional district.

They refused to do so, meaning Harris still stands a strong chance of holding on to the one winnable vote awarded by the Omaha district.