The states Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Georgia decided the 2020 election, and were predicted to determine whether Vice President Kamala Harris or former (at the time) President Trump would take the Oval Office in 2024. And in the end, they did.

But in 2026, only three of the above states are holding Senate elections. This represents the smallest “core” playing field out of the past few election cycles. In Georgia, Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff, who defeated incumbent Republican Sen. David Purdue alongside Sen. Raphael Warnock in a dramatic set of Jan. 5, 2021 runoffs that handed Democrats a slim 50-seat majority and set the stage for the Biden administration, is up for reelection. Slightly upwards in latitude is North Carolina, where moderate Republican Sen. Thom Tillis is retiring and popular, recently-out-of-office Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper has recently announced a run. Finally, look up north to Michigan, where two-term incumbent Democratic Sen. Gary Peters is not running for reelection and the Democratic primary is shaping up to be a bitter, hard-fought contest between MI-11 Rep. Haley Stevens — who is the favored candidate of national Democrats like former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi — and state Sen. Mallory McMorrow — who has received endorsements from many colleagues in the state legislature. Whoever emerges victorious from the Democratic primary will likely face former MI-08 Rep. candidate Mike Rogers, who in 2024 came within 20,000 votes of winning the Wolverine State’s other Senate seat.

These three races will likely be analyzed to death by forecasters and pundits, and for good reason: they will probably feature the closest results and the highest amount of spending due to the relatively large populations and expensive media markets of all three states.

Republicans currently hold a 53-seat majority in the Senate, meaning that Democrats must hold on to their current Senate seats and win four Republican-held seats to win a 51-seat, tiebreaker-proof majority. On a surface level, the cards seem to be stacked in Republicans’ favor. However, their objective should be to not only retain their majority, but expand it.

Large components of Trump’s agenda have either been derailed or delayed due to resistance from the most moderate voices in the caucus: think Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, Maine Sen. Susan Collins, North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis, Utah Sen. John Curtis, and occasionally Kentucky Sen. and former Republican leader Mitch McConnell. McConnell isn’t running for reelection in 2026, and the race to succeed him will likely be hotly contested between former state Attorney General Daniel Cameron and KY-06 Rep. Andy Barr. Of the two, Cameron represents the more mainline conservative while Barr has identified with the far right during his House of Representatives tenure. As mentioned earlier, Tillis is retiring and his seat is up for grabs in 2026, but his proven success as a quasi-moderate Republican in a state where far-right lunatics like former Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson were punished by voters (he lost the state’s 2024 gubernatorial election by 14.8 percentage points) might caution the state party about nominating a more Trumpy successor. Collins is running for reelection in 2026, but again, her track record of success in a Democratic-leaning state should hold off the party from considering a primary challenger despite her moderate voting record in D.C. Finally, Murkowski and Curtis aren’t up for reelection in 2026.

To summarize: at least two (and likely more) members of the moderate wing will remain for the entirety of Trump’s second term, so Republicans would be wise to target additional seats in order to strengthen the conservative core of their majority.

Democrats no longer have to deal with former Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, both perpetual roadblocks who held up many of Democrats’ more progressive agenda items — raising the federal minimum wage, eliminating the filibuster, and the Biden administration’s signature multi-trillion dollar spending package known colloquially as Build Back Better. Their sole objective should be a net gain of four seats, but this simple-sounding task won’t be an easy one. Two of the three swing-state seats are already held by Democrats. Not only does this deprive them of pickup opportunities, but it also forces them to play defense, allocating significant resources towards Michigan and Georgia that could be spent in other areas.

All this being said: it is not just beneficial but absolutely necessary that both parties target seats outside of their “comfort zone” — which I’m defining as states which voted for a single party in both the 2020 and 2024 presidential elections.

Democrats

ALASKA: A waiting game for Peltola

For Democrats, Alaska has always been a “wait for lightning to strike” state. former Democratic AK-AL Rep. Mary Peltola has the profile to make that lightning bolt real: popular, bipartisan appeal, and already tested in tough statewide races. She first defeated former Gov. Sarah Palin in a 2022 special election by 3 percentage points, then by 10 in the regular November election. In 2024, despite Trump winning the Last Frontier by 13.1 percentage points, Peltola came within 2.8 points of winning a second full term, despite being defeated by current Republican Rep. Nick Begich III — a full 10 point overperformance. Peltola, with a unique mix of progressive and conservative policy positions — supporting gun rights while being pro-choice and an adamant defender of LGBTQ protections — and a personal brand focused heavily on regional industries like fisheries, is the real deal.

The problem? Dan Sullivan is steady, uncontroversial, and not especially vulnerable. Peltola might decide the smarter play is holding off until Lisa Murkowski’s next cycle in 2028, when an open race could be within reach.

IOWA: A democratic revival?

Iowa has been anything fertile ground for Democrats in the past decade. After former Pres. Barack Obama won the Hawkeye State by healthy margins in 2008 and 2012, the state’s voters lurched to the right and haven’t looked back since. The root cause: the state’s large rural population — primarily in the agricultural industry due to the state’s location amidst the Great Plains — has abandoned Democrats en masse as its center of influence has shifted from the Midwest to the coasts and Republicans — largely led by Pres. Donald Trump — have embraced populism and rhetoric designed to appeal to working-class whites.

In general, the Iowan picture is dire for Democrats, but in a midterm environment, the calculus can change. In 2018, Democrats took 3 of 4 House of Representatives seats despite the state supporting Trump by near-double digits in the surrounding elections of 2016 and 2020. In 2022, Democratic Senate nominee Michael Franken held longtime Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley to the lowest margin of victory in his career. In midterm environments, where high turnout isn’t guaranteed and rural, less highly-educated voters are more likely to stay home, the results have more room for variability.

Add in former Paralympian basketball player Josh Turek, who among a field of Democratic options seems to have the most compelling and authentic narrative, and Iowa might just host a real racr.

Recently, incumbent Sen. Joni Ernst dropped out of the race after delivering an oppo-soundbyte for the ages in response to concerns about Medicaid spending under Trump: “We’re all going to die.” Running to replace her is IA-02 Rep and former news anchor Ashley Hinson, who like most Republicans running for Senate has chosen to embrace Trump fully — which in a state with as strong a MAGA presence as any, might not be a misstep.

Additionally: Democratic State Auditor Rob Sand’s — the only statewide Democrat to win an election in 2022 — strong gubernatorial campaign will very likely benefit the Democratic Senate nominee as a result of its coattail effect.

Despite these favorable conditions, whoever wins the Democratic primary will be fighting a very uphill battle. This is an unavoidable reality for the Democratic party in Iowa. But looking beyond the one seat, a competitive race here (along with a dogfight at the top of the ballot) could breathe life back into the state party.

KANSAS: The independent wild card

Incumbent Republican Sen. and physician Roger Marshall doesn’t draw the same headlines as Josh Hawley or Ted Cruz, but make no mistake: he’s cut from the same ultra-conservative, hardline-MAGA cloth, and that makes him vulnerable to a centrist or independent challenge. Kansas has been trending in intriguing ways: white voters — especially those in suburban collar counties surrounding Kansas City and Topeka, as well as college towns like Lawrence — are moving left, and in 2024, the state handed Trump at 16.1 percent margin of victory while simultaneously trending left by 5.5 points compared to national averages (since the nation as a whole shifted around 6 points to the right). Coupled with a favorable national environment — which seems likely given Trump’s declining popularity numbers — if Democrats can convince KS-03 Rep. Sharice Davids to run, who has consistently overperformed national Democrats since defeating incumbent Republican Rep. Kevin Yoder in 2018, things might just get interesting.

There’s another possibly, though: remember all the way back to 2014, when independent candidate and businessman Greg Orman ran in lieu of a Democratic nominee and held longtime incumbent Sen. Pat Roberts to a smaller-than-expect 12 percent margin of victory despite a Republican-friendly national environment (it was Obama’s second midterm). This strategy has seen repeated success in tightening seemingly-safe Republican races in states like Utah and Nebraska in the years since. These states’ similar demographics —largely white, rural, and not overly religious — which seem to create an environment favorable to third-way candidacies. Kansas could become one of the cycle’s strangest but most fascinating races.

TEXAS: The Cornyn conundrum

Texas always tempts Democrats, but rarely delivers. After featuring its closest presidential race in the 21st century in 2020, with Trump winning the state by a narrow 5.6 percentage points, Texas has shifted farther back into familiar Republican terrain. In 2024, Trump won the Lone Star State by 13.7 percentage points, largely riding off record-high Latino support in southern Texas and holding off Democratic gains in the suburbs surrounding the Dallas and Austin metros.

The wrinkle this cycle is whether Ken Paxton, the scandal-plagued Attorney General, can pull off a primary against John Cornyn. After leading in most early primary polling, Paxton has seen his lead crumble after calling for prayer time in schools and reports of adultery — culminating in his recent divorce — circulated.

If Paxton manages to win the primary, which is still a ways away, he will emerge battered and bloody. Democrats will no doubt see blood in the water. Former Democratic Rep. Colin Allred, who overperformed Kamala Harris in his Senate race against Ted Cruz last November, is running again. State Rep. James Tallerico, who caught fire on the internet due to his unique mix of piousness and progressivism, also recently entered the race. A prolonged and brutal Democratic primary could set their sights off the real challenge: facing whichever Republican makes it to the November general. Ideally, one of the two Democrats eventually steps aside and lends their full support to the other — or, it becomes clear which candidate is superior and they are able to win the primary with ease. Time will tell the rest of the story on both sides of the race — and right now, plenty on time remains.

Republicans

NEW JERSEY: Cementing a Republican resurgence?

Perhaps the most intriguing under-the-rader result in 2024 was that of New Jersey: Kamala Harris only won the Garden State by 5.9 percentage points, a whopping 10 point shift right from 2020.

Incumbent Senator Cory Booker (D), first elected in 2013, has officially filed for re-election to a third full term in 2026. While he is undoubtedly a charismatic politician, and has performed well in his previous elections, he is clearly a man with ambitions for higher office. In the past half-decade, he has become more and more of a national figure, culminating in his record-breaking quasi-filibuster speech in protest of the Trump administration’s aggressive dismantling of federal programs. When politicians focus on elevating their national profile, it tends to hurt their image among their constituency (see: Beto O’Rourke). This isn’t always true, but it’s worth noting.

How Republicans perform in the upcoming gubernatorial election in November — four years after Republican state assemblyman Jack Ciattarelli came within 3.2 percentage points of knocking off incumbent Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy in what would’ve been one of the greatest upsets of the 21st century — will play a large role in determining how seriously Republicans take next year’s Senate race. Ciattarelli is running again, this time against Democratic NJ-11 Rep. Mikie Sherrill, a former naval and federal officer. Sherrill leads most of the polling aggregates by around 8 percentage points, but it wouldn’t be difficult to envision a reality where Sherrill wins by less than 5. If this is the case, I wouldn’t be surprised if national Republicans started paying more attention to New Jersey. While no serious candidates have announced a Senate run yet, there are a couple prospective Republicans who could make it a serious contest. While NJ-07 Rep. Tom Kean has announced he is running for reelection in his current seat, I wouldn’t be surprised if he switches races following an unexpectedly close result in November. Similarly, I could also see Ciattarelli jumping into the Senate race if he once again comes edges to victory in November.

VIRGINIA: A recurring, elusive target

Virginia is a similar story to that of New Jersey: states with large suburban, affluent, highly-educated populations which shifted left during the first Trump term but returned to more conservative habits during the Biden administration. Coincidentally, the Old Dominion will also feature a gubernatorial election this November, following Republican businessman and current Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s stunning upset in the 2021 gubernatorial election four years prior. Because of Virginia’s unique constitution, Youngkin cannot seek a consecutive second term; running largely as his successor is Lt. Gov. Winsome Sears, who has run into considerable controversy after making — and doubling down on — numerous homophobic and transphobic statements. Opposing her is former VA-07 Rep. Abigail Spanberger, a moderate Democrat during her time in the House. Spanberger’s 2025 gubernatorial campaign offers a window into the strategic ground Democrats intend to hold. Campaigning in rural locales across the Commonwealth—from oyster farms to Appalachian towns—she targeted communities where Trump made gains in 2024. In several rural counties (for example, Nottoway, Powhatan, Amelia, and Louisa), Spanberger had outperformed Biden in 2020 — evidence of her potential to erode GOP margins outside suburban corridors. Yet Republicans such as Earle-Sears are deploying nationalized messaging — framing Democrats as too urban and disconnected — from issues ranging from socialism to rural healthcare closures. Like in New Jersey, I wouldn’t be surprising if Virginia’s 2025 gubernatorial election acts as a bellweather for 2026 and determines just how much Republican invest in the Old Dominion.

As the Commonwealth of Virginia gears up for the 2026 U.S. Senate race, the political currents are both familiar and evolving. Incumbent Senator Mark Warner, a seasoned Democrat serving since 2009, is officially seeking a fourth term, drawing on his reputation as a pragmatic centrist in a state that has steadily trended blue over the past two cycles. His expected campaign will be tested by both demographic transformations and strategic GOP maneuvers aiming at a narrow opening.

Virginia in 2024 revealed just how volatile suburban dynamics have become. While Vice President Kamala Harris won the state with 51.8% of the vote — down from Biden’s 10 point margin of victory in 2020 — the battle lines shifted noticeably in key suburbs. The results in Loudon County were among the earliest indicators on November 5th, 2024, of a Republican resurgence in the suburbs. In fact, the whole of Northern Virginia and the D.C. suburbs lurched right in 2024.

From these shifting suburban trends emerges the strategic opportunity Republicans hope to capitalize on in 2026. The most discussed name on the Republican side of the aisle is that of Glenn Youngkin, whose aforementioned 2021 gubernatorial upset showcased his suburban crossover appeal.

Despite these battleground signs, Virginia’s fundamentals remain friendly to Democrats. In 2024, Senator Tim Kaine easily secured re-election with a 8.9 percentage point advantage over Republican Hung Cao, significantly over performing Kamala Harris’ 5.8 percent margin of victory.

NEW HAMPSHIRE: Building on a strong 2024

Whether New Hampshire’s 2026 Senate race truly qualifies as a sleeper is a matter of opinion. 2024 was by and large a successful year for Granite State Republicans: Trump came within 2.8 percentage points of winning, a significant improvement on his 7 point loss in 2020, and former Republican Sen. Kelly Ayotte won the open gubernatorial seat with ease — a 9.3 percentage point victory, to be specific — over Democratic nominee Joyce Craig. The stage is set for a dramatic 2026 showdown, but most agree that Democrats are still clear favorites.

When incumbent Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen announced her retirement in March 2025, Democrats lost one of their strongest incumbents — someone who in 2020 outperformed Joe Biden by nearly 10 points and consistently carved out crossover appeal that insulated her from New Hampshire’s swing-state volatility. Her departure opens the door for a rare open-seat contest, the kind of race that can scramble traditional partisan lines in a state where voters pride themselves on their independence.

On the Democratic side, the early advantage belongs to NH-01 Rep. Chris Pappas, who declared his candidacy in April. Pappas has built a record of overperformance in the state’s most competitive district, where he won tough reelection fights in years like 2022 that were unfavorable for Democrats nationally. His ability to survive in a swing district gives him credibility as a statewide candidate, especially in a cycle where Democrats desperately need someone who can unite progressives, moderates, and independents. Perhaps most importantly, Pappas benefits from the lack of a messy or toxic primary. With other major figures such as freshman Rep. Maggie Goodlander declining to run, the party is largely coalescing around him. That matters in New Hampshire, which holds very late primaries that often leave nominees with little time to recover before the general election. Republicans, meanwhile, are again turning to the Sununu dynasty.

The twist? This time, it’s not Chris.

Popular 4-term Governor Chris Sununu declined to enter the race, his brother, former Senator John Sununu, has stepped forward to reclaim his old seat. It may not be the Sununu Republicans initially hoped for, but the name carries weight in New Hampshire politics, evoking respect from both party loyalists and independent voters who value the family’s decades-long presence in public service. Added to the mix is another name from (relatively) long ago: Scott Brown, the former Massachusetts senator and Trump’s ambassador to New Zealand during his first term, who officially launched his campaign in June 2025. Brown has attempted to frame himself as a conservative outsider with national credentials, but his Massachusetts roots could be a liability in a state that takes its local identity seriously (read my previous article of carpetbagging for a more in-depth look at the phenomenon)

The contest is shaping up as a classic test of dynasty politics versus fresh Democratic overperformance. On one side, Republicans hope the Sununu name will resonate in the absence of the equally prestigious surname Shaheen, giving them a chance to flip a seat Democrats have held since 2008. On the other, Pappas is banking on his track record of surviving tough races and his ability to avoid internal party warfare to present himself as the steady hand for Democrats in a volatile state. Both parties know New Hampshire’s electorate is notoriously fickle, and with Shaheen no longer on the ballot, this race is as wide open as it’s been in more than a decade.

It’s hard to think of a state in this election with greater consequences and implications – both this year and beyond – than Georgia. The fate of both the Democrats and Republicans, along with their future trajectory in the ever-bitter fight for national dominance, will depend on which candidate Georgians vote for, and how these results vary based on demographics, geography, and industry, 

You’re likely asking: “Why? Sure, Georgia will be important: everyone says it’s one of the 7 swing states, and 16 electoral votes are nothing to laugh about. But why is it more important than Michigan, with its 15 electoral votes? Or Pennsylvania, with 19?”

Let me ask you to look beyond electoral votes for a moment. Georgia is located at the heart of the Deep South, both geographically and demographically. It lies between South Carolina, Alabama, Florida, and Tennessee. Its population, which is around two-thirds white and one-third black and heavily religious across the board, is in line with these surrounding states. For most of the 21st century, the South has been among the least favorable regions for Democrats across the nation. But when Democrats won Georgia by 0.2% in 2020 – breaking a 28-year-long Republican voting streak in the state – on a coalition of Black voters and suburban voters, it represented a turning point not just for Georgia Democrats, but for Southern Democrats on the whole. No longer were they reliant on the ancestrally-Democratic rural white voters who had long forsaken the party: Democrats could count on a stronger, higher-propensity, and above-all, consistent coalition. Or so they thought.

In 2022, Republicans nearly swept the board in Georgia. Apart from the Senate race, where Republican nominee Herschel Walker ran his campaign into the ground amidst reports of domestic abuse, carpetbagging, and funding past abortions, Republicans won every statewide office up for election by large margins. Incumbent Republican governor Brian Kemp won reelection by nearly 8% in 2022, a significant improvement from his sub-2% victory in 2018. Lieutenant Governor Brad Raffensberger, who received widespread national attention after refusing to entertain Trump’s election challenges in 2020, won reelection by more than 10% – the highest among all statewide Republicans that year.

On a national level, 2022 represented a promising electoral landscape for Democrats: one where suburban and independent voters’ recent gravitation towards the left might not have simply been caused by Trump, but was instead a more lasting ideological shift. In Georgia, however, the results told a different story. Voters in the heavily-suburban, highly educated, mostly secular, fast-growing, and historically-Republican counties surrounding Atlanta (think Gwinnett, DeKalb, and Forsyth) had supported Democrats by record margins in 2020. But in 2022, they largely shifted away from the party. Additionally, where minority voters turned out in record margins in 2020 (across the nation, but especially in Georgia), these numbers had shrunken substantially – even considering that midterm elections usually depress turnout compared to presidential contests.

With this in mind, let’s look to the present. 2024 will either confirm Georgia’s purple tint or reaffirm its redder-than-blue hue. Democrats enter the race with a crucial starting advantage, or so it might seem. Donald Trump is running again – remember, he is arguably the man who instigated Georgia’s massive leftward shift in the first place, winning the state by 5% in 2016 (compared to Romney’s 9% in 2012) and outright losing in 2020. However, there is evidence to suggest that Trump is not the political toxin he once was. Since leaving D.C., Trump’s favorability numbers have risen to a career-high: many polls show him at a near-even standing with voters. Additionally, where in 2020, Democrats coasted on a tide of out-party favorability ratings, in 2024, Democrats’ standing has fallen. Biden’s four years in office have seen notable accomplishments been made – not limited to the Inflation Reduction Act and pivotal American Rescue Plan – but have been marred by high inflation, and a generally-sluggish economy in the aftermath of COVID-19. Although the economy has sped up in recent months, the (perception) damage has been done. 

Thankfully for Democrats, Biden isn’t their nominee. Kamala Harris is: and it doesn’t seem she has bore the blunt of the blame for the unpopular Biden administration, despite being his No. 2.

Current polls indicate a highly competitive race in Georgia. A Marist College poll shows a tie between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, each securing 49% support among likely voters. Similarly, a FiveThirtyEight aggregation reports Trump leading by a narrow margin of 1%. 

In a state as significant as Georgia – both for the next 4 years and the next decades – the closeness of the race is maddening. It is impossible to confidently predict, in good faith, who will come out on top. But we’ll give it our best guess. 

When in doubt, stick with the fundamentals. It’s not at all difficult to believe that Republicans, now the ‘out’ party facing a damaged Democratic party whose struggles have especially manifested among minority voters, will claw their way back to victory in Georgia. 

This is where we stand (albeit on shaky and wobbly feet): Trump +0.5%.

WISCONSIN

Historically the reddest of the Rust Belt 3, Wisconsin may again prove pivotal in 2024. 

Democrats’ clearest path to victory come Tuesday is through the Upper Midwest: if they win Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, while holding NE-2, Democrats win a 270-268 victory in the electoral college.

The most common reason for this belief: while Kamala Harris has shown relatively weak numbers (compared to Biden’s 2020 showing) among minority groups including Black, Hispanic, and Asian Americans, she’s held up surprisingly well among white voters – including older, working-class ones. For this reason, the conventional narrative has shifted the focus from the Sun Belt states of Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina (which were arguably the more notable and important results from 2020) towards the Rust Belt – a region that has been no stranger to supporting Democratic candidates since the 1980’s but has taken a sharp turn to the right in the Trump era.

Currently, most analysts believe that Pennsylvania is the shakiest of the three. Polling-wise, this assessment seems to be (tentatively) correct.

Let’s compare the two states, starting with Pennsylvania. An Echelon Insights poll conducted from October 27-30, 2024, showed Donald Trump leading Kamala Harris by 6% – a significantly larger margin for Trump than what most other polling has shown. For instance: a Marist College poll found Harris ahead by 2 points. 

In Wisconsin, the race is similarly close – albeit the slightest bit more friendly for Democrats. The same Echelon Insights poll reported a tie between Harris and Trump, at 48% each. The FiveThirtyEight polling average indicates Harris leading by approximately 0.7 percentage points, roughly equivalent to Biden's 0.6% victory in the state in 2020.

So here’s the polling picture: while Wisconsin and Pennsylvania are bound to be close, it seems that Wisconsin is poised to be slightly more blue than Pennsylvania in the coming election.

There’s reason to believe this is true. Although Wisconsin has supported Trump by the largest margins out of the Rust Belt 3 in his two runs for president, the elections preceding 2016 tell a different story. In 2008 and 2012, Wisconsin supported Barack Obama by 14% and 7%, respectively, while Pennsylvania supported him by 10% and 5%, respectively. Small, but notable differences.

Looking even farther back, Wisconsin has been a cornerstone of Progressivism in the United States. The La Follette dynasty, a political family that led the Progressive movement in the early 20th century, called Wisconsin home. In 1988, Wisconsin was the only one of the Rust Belt states to support the ‘Massachusetts liberal’ Michael Dukakis against incumbent President George H.W. Bush. In the early 21st century, Wisconsin thrice voted for Senator Russ Feingold – a champion of modern progressive causes until he was defeated for reelection in 2010, and denied a comeback victory in 2016.

For Harris to win, she must do a couple of things.

First, she must turn out the core coalition: the majority-minority residents of Milwaukee and Madison, the two major cities in Wisconsin. National demographic polling of the race has painted a potentially dire picture for Harris among minorities: she’s consistently polled worse than Biden (in 2020) among Hispanic, Black, and Asian voters. We will see in the coming days how much of this alleged racial depolarization comes to fruition, but I would be inclined to believe the story the polls and experts are communicating. 

Because of this dropoff in minority support, Harris must do some heavy lifting among Wisconsin’s other core political factions. She must hold the fort in rural areas across the state, where only 15 years ago Barack Obama had won but have shifted heavily rightward in the years since.  More importantly, however, Harris must build on Democrats’ strong recent performances in suburban Wisconsin – both the bluer areas and the red. 

For the former category, Dane County (which contains Madison and its surrounding suburbs) is Democrats’ prime target – not just to win, but to win by a lot. In 2022, Gov. Tony Evers won nearly 80% of the vote in Dane, turning out a massive 236,000 voters. Harris will need to replicate this margin of victory, or at least come extremely close, in order to win statewide. 

For the latter category, Harris must continue Democrats’ struggle in the WOW counties surrounding Milwaukee. Waukesha, Ozaukee, and Washington County have supported Republican presidential candidates by over 60% since the turn of the century. However, there is some evidence to suggest that the counties have began shifting leftward in the last few years. In 2022, Evers narrowed the Republican shares of the vote in Waukesha and Ozaukee below 60%. Harris should hope to continue Evers’ efforts in 2024.

All this being said, it is easier than easy to see Wisconsin going either way in 2024. Amidst a sea of uncertainty, my one personal insight is this: if Pennsylvania is going Republican, so will Wisconsin (with one caveat). Wisconsin is whiter and more rural than Pennsylvania, and its metro areas are just as prone to depressed turnout as those in the Keystone State. 

With this is mind, you might think that we’re predicting a narrow Trump win. But we’re not.

Here’s that caveat: Wisconsin’s geographic situation near the Great Plains means that the supposed ‘blue surge’ polling has predicted in Nebraska, Kansas, and Iowa (looking at you, Selzer!) might have more of an impact of Wisconsin’s rural electorate compared to Pennsylvania’s. Because of this, we predict Kamala Harris will ever-so-slightly beat Trump in Wisconsin, likely by a fraction of a percentage point. To be any more specific would prioritize precision at the cost of accuracy.

MICHIGAN

Go Blue! Or will it…

If there was any state out of the Swingy Seven we were confident in making a prediction about, it would be Michigan. Out of Rust Belt Three, Michigan is generally agreed to be the bluest – but don’t let this fool you: it’s still a purple, purple state.

If you’ve been paying any attention to the political development of the last 8 years, you likely know a great deal about the Upper Midwest – how three reliably-democratic states abandoned Democrat Hillary Clinton amidst a storm of white, working-class resentment towards Democrats fueled by decades of perceived apathy and outright disdain from the party.

After decades of voting consecutively Democratic in presidential elections since 1988, the state flipped to Donald Trump in 2016 by around 10,000 votes. In 2020, however, Joe Biden reclaimed Michigan for the Democrats, winning by 2.8%

Michigan is about three-quarters white, 14% Black, 5% Hispanic or Latino, and 3% Asian. This racial makeup is remarkably similar to the nation’s at large, albeit with a slightly higher white proportion of the population.

The substantial Black population (primarily concentrated in urban areas such as Detroit and Flint) will play a significant, if not crucial role in deciding the election. Poor turnout in these areas in 2016 arguably made the difference between a Clinton win and her actual 0.2% loss in the state. Suburban counties around Detroit and other metro areas have grown and diversified within the last decades. Latino and Asian communities have helped contribute to shifting political dynamics.

There are a few counties that hold outsized importance in Michigan’s politican landscape, starting with Wayne County, home to Detroit. Wayne is Michigan’s most populous and a stronghold for the Democratic Party. In 2020, Biden secured approximately 68% of the vote here, bolstered by high turnout among Black voters. As we mentioned, this is an area where Harris must turn out voters: or else, she’ll have to claw her way back with less friendly voters.

In terms of suburban Micigan, Oakland and Macomb are perhaps the most important. Oakland County, a historically Republican-leaning suburb, has trended Democratic in recent elections due to its increasingly diverse and educated population. Biden won Oakland County with about 56% of the vote in 2020. The county serves as a bellwether for suburban voters nationwide and will be a primary target for both parties in 2024. Macomb County is another proto-typically conservative country which exemplified the “Reagan Democrats” of the 80’s. Macomb County exemplifies the blue-collar voters who swung to Trump in 2016 but showed more mixed results in 2020, with Trump winning narrowly. This county's response to the economic policies and populist rhetoric of the candidates will be a key indicator of working-class sentiment in the state.

Urban centers such as Detroit, Flint, and Ann Arbor are Democratic bastions, driven by racially diverse and younger populations. Suburbs, particularly around Detroit, have become increasingly important as their populations have grown and become more competitive. In contrast, Michigan’s rural areas, including the Upper Peninsula and regions in the northern Lower Peninsula, tend to vote overwhelmingly Republican. It’s a pattern replicated across nearly the entire country, and one that will hold true for the foreseeable future.

Educational attainment might be the most important factor in Michigan’s political dynamics, apart from ethnicity. Counties with a higher percentage of college-educated residents, such as Washtenaw County (home to Ann Arbor and the University of Michigan), lean heavily Democratic. On the other side of the coin, areas with lower levels of college education (typically rural and whiter) tend to favor Republicans, especially as of late. Turnout in these areas and among these voters – who tend to be lower-propensity – will be crucial if Trump hopes to improve his standing in the Wolverine State.

Religiosity also plays a similar role here, particularly in more rural and conservative parts ofthe state. Evangelical Christians and Catholic communities in West Michigan and the rural north often align with the socially-conservative platform of the modern Republican Party. We saw this come to fruition in the 2022 elections and abortion referendum, when heavily-religious counties actually shifted rightwards in the wake of the Dobbs ruling while the rest of the state bolted left.

Michigan's economy has long been associated with manufacturing, particularly the automotive industry. Detroit, historically known as the “Motor City,” has been the epicenter of auto manufacturing for decades. The prominence of unions, particularly the United Auto Workers (UAW), has historically aligned with Democratic policies that support labor rights and job protections. The 2007 recession arguably caused Michigan voters – especially those in the auto industry – to back Barack Obama by over 15% in 2008. However, many of these same voters flocked to the Republican side of the aisle less than a decade later, for the exact same reason: their struggles went utterly unnoticed by a D.C. which seemed to prioritize coastal elites above all other Americans.

Michigan’s importance in the 2024 election cannot be overstated. For Democrats, maintaining robust turnout in urban centers and growing suburban support is essential, while Republicans will seek to amplify their rural base and recapture voters swayed by economic and cultural issues. We believe Kamala Harris will win Michigan: whether by a 0.1% or 5% margin, we are far from certain, though we’ll wager it’s closer to the former.

NEVADA

Although it may be the only swing state this election that Donald Trump didn’t win in 2016, Nevada is far from being a newcomer to this club. In the last 12 elections, the Silver State has gone red 6 times and gone blue the other 6. From 2008 through 2020, the state exclusively voted for the Democratic presidential candidate. Most recently, Joe Biden won the state with 50.1% of the vote to incumbent Republican Donald Trump’s 47.8%. Nevada was one of only 7 states that Trump performed better in 2020 compared to his 2016 run, an indicator of the state’s shift to the right in recent years. Today, Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Kamala Harris are in a tense race to take Nevada’s 6 electoral votes. Will Trump become the first Republican to win the state since George Bush way back in 2004? Or will Harris be able to retain Nevada for the Democrats?

Nevada is one of the fastest-growing states in the nation. Its population has almost tripled since 1990, from 1.2 million to 3.2 million people, largely due to the growth of Las Vegas into the 21st largest urban area in the US. In fact, Clark County, which includes Las Vegas and its suburbs, contains 73% of the state’s population, making Nevada the most centralized state in the nation. This rapid population growth has been fueled in large part by immigrants from Latin American nations. While in 1970 non-Hispanic whites made up 88% of Nevada’s population, today that number is just 45.93%. Hispanics are now 28.68% of the population, with Blacks, Asians, and Mixed-Race people coming in at 9.4%, 8.57%, and 5.38%, respectively. Tellingly, as Nevada’s non-Hispanic white population decreased from 65.21% in 2000 to 45.93% in 2020, so too did Republican performance decline. Historically, Hispanics as a whole have supported the Democratic Party; with 66% of them voting for Clinton in 2016. But in 2020, Biden’s performance with this key group slipped; he received just 59% support. Moreover, examining the results based on the educational divide, in 2020 Trump won 41% of Hispanics without a college degree. This is very important in Nevada, as the state has the 7th lowest percentage of residents with a college degree, coming in at a mere 27.57%. So, Trump’s path to victory in the state is simple: win over working-class white and Hispanic voters.

Recent polling has shown that Trump has completely erased the Democrats’ lead with Hispanic men; now he and Harris draw equal support from this group. Additionally, Harris now has the support of just 54% of all Hispanics, down 5 points from Biden 4 years ago and a whopping 12 points from Clinton 4 years before that. These numbers aren’t good for the Democrats and certainly point towards a Trump victory in Nevada, where even a minor shift in the preferences of this key group of voters can determine the outcome of the entire race.

Now, looking at Nevada’s polls, Trump has taken a narrow lead over Harris of 0.9 points in the RealClearPolitics average. Interestingly, Trump actually underperformed expectations in Nevada in 2016, losing the state to Clinton by 2.42 points when the polls had him up 2 points on November 1st. However, in 2020, Trump overperformed, losing the state to Biden by 2.39 points when the polls had him trailing by 4 points. With this in mind, we’ve decided that trusting this election cycle’s numbers is our best bet at predicting the winner. Therefore, we believe that Donald Trump will win Nevada by between 0.5 and 2 points.

NORTH CAROLINA

The only swing state this election that went red in 2020, North Carolina proved to be an unlikely tossup; after all, Trump won the state by 1.34 points against Democrat Joe Biden four years ago. In an election where Trump is expected to perform significantly better than his last run, how can North Carolina possibly not go Republican? Well, there’s been a perfect storm of bad circumstances for the GOP, and I mean that literally; the state was just devastated by Hurricane Helene in late September, which took over 101 lives and caused over $53 billion in damages. Helene ravaged the western portions of the state that heavily supported Donald Trump back in 2020, raising questions of whether disruptions from the storm will lower turnout in this key region for the Republicans.

But the other storm in the state is over their Republican Candidate for Governor, Mark Robinson. Having been narrowly elected North Carolina’s Lieutenant Governor back in 2020, Robinson took the logical next step and announced his bid for the governorship last year, cruising through the Republican primary. And while Robinson being both a Republican and the first African American major party nominee in a state that is over 20% Black might make him seem like a shoo-in, he turned out to have more skeletons in his closet than any politician in a long time. For starters, Robinson has been criticized for his stance on abortion. After openly calling it “murder” even in cases of rape and incest, he admitted that back in the 1980s he paid for his girlfriend to have one. Additionally, he has met backlash for comments made about the LGBTQ community; Robinson has previously called homosexuality “an abominable sin” and just this past February supported arresting transgender people for using a restroom that doesn’t match their birth sex. The Lieutenant Governor has also faced resistance for his alleged antisemitism, such as in a Facebook post where he declared that the movie Black Panther was “created by an agnostic Jew and put to film by satanic Marxists.” But these controversies from earlier in his campaign pale in comparison to the firestorm that was released in September when CNN found posts Robinson made on the pornographic website Nude Africa from 2008 to 2012. In these posts, he referred to himself as a “perv,” voiced his hate for Martin Luther King, and, most famously, declared himself to be a “Black Nazi.” Needless to say, all of these abhorrent statements have caused Robinson to tank in the polls; he now trails his Democratic opponent Josh Stein by between 15 and 20 points.

While Mark Robinson’s political career will almost certainly end after this election, he may just take Donald Trump’s with him. The gubernatorial candidate’s controversies are undoubtedly hurting Trump’s performance in the state; he now leads Vice President Kamala Harris by just 1.7 points in the North Carolina RealClearPolitics Average. There’s the possibility that the former president loses the state, and its 16 electoral votes, due to Republican voters who are already planning to not vote for Robinson deciding to skip out on voting for Trump too. But whatever the case may be, thanks to Robinson, you can expect to see many split ballots in the Tarheel State this November.

Although the controversy surrounding Mark Robinson will without a doubt hurt Trump’s performance in North Carolina, we find it unlikely that it’ll be enough to tip the state to Harris. While she may have briefly caught Trump in the state back in September, the former president’s numbers quickly rebounded and have been rising steadily since mid-October. Therefore, we predict that North Carolina will remain red for Trump by roughly the same margin it did in 2020, of between 1 and 1.5 points.

PENNSYLVANIA

Pennsylvania:

If there’s any state that could be the tipping point in this election, it’s Pennsylvania. The rust belt state of 13 million people has played an outsized role in the last two presidential races. From 1992 to 2012, the state voted blue in every presidential election; however, in 2016, when Republican Donald Trump upset Democrat Hillary Clinton, the Keystone State went red for the first time in 28 years, albeit very narrowly. Trump received 48.2% of the vote to Clinton’s 47.5%, a margin of victory of just 0.7 points. Along with his success in Wisconsin and Michigan, it signaled the collapse of the “blue wall,” a collection of states that had gone for the Democrats in every presidential election since 1992. But in 2020, Trump’s luck in the commonwealth ran out, with the incumbent losing the state to Democratic challenger and native Pennsylvanian Joe Biden, 48.7% to 49.9%. This November, Donald Trump once again finds himself battling it out in Pennsylvania, this time against Vice President Kamala Harris. And the arguably most important question in this election remains: will Trump be able to defeat Harris and flip this all-important rust belt state back to the Republicans?

Several factors indicate that Pennsylvania is heading towards a GOP victory. For one thing, the early voting data is certainly a good sign for Republicans. According to the University of Florida election lab, as of October 29th, registered Democrats in Pennsylvania have cast 837,916 votes early, while registered Republicans have cast 458,055 votes. And although this means Republicans are being beaten by Democrats in early voting 31.6% to 57.8%, these numbers are significantly better than in 2020, when Democrats were winning this share of the vote 64.7% to 23.7%. While other factors could be at play, such as the Trump campaign encouraging early voting during this election cycle, which they didn’t in 2020, the significance of this shift can’t be overlooked when a single point sway towards Trump could determine whether he wins back the White House.

Beyond this, Trump has had several high-profile campaign moments in Pennsylvania. Most famously, he was almost assassinated at a rally in Butler, PA on July 13th. In the aftermath of this horrible event, Trump jumped significantly in the polls and saw his highest odds of winning the election to date: 66.2% on the RealClearPolitics Betting Average. His comeback rally to the site on October 5th, featuring Elon Musk, was also widely watched and turned out a crowd of over 50,000. Additionally, Trump’s visit to a McDonald’s in Bucks County and appearance at the Steelers game two weeks ago were two more bright spots for his campaign in the Keystone state. While these moments are unlikely to change the election’s outcome, their memories may persist in the minds of undecided voters and net the former President some key votes.

Turning to the polls, Trump holds a small lead of 0.6 points, which is within the margin of error in almost any poll; so, effectively, the two are tied. However, as we have seen so often in the past, the polls can get it completely wrong. Historically, Trump has significantly overperformed in Pennsylvania. In 2016, Hillary Clinton held a lead of 5.1 points at this time in the election cycle, and in 2020, Joe Biden held a lead of 3.8 points. Clinton went on to lose the state by 0.7 points, a difference of 5.8%, and Biden went on to win by just 1.2 points, a difference of 2.6%. Therefore, with Trump being ahead in Pennsylvania for the first time in an election, his odds of winning the state look encouraging.

But at the end of the day, this race is basically a coin toss. And while it’s certainly hard for us to choose between Trump and Harris, we feel that Trump has a slight edge. It’s a mixture of the near-misses, the consistent underestimation, and the promising early voting numbers that compel us to choose red over blue. We predict that Trump will carry the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania by between 0.1 and 2 points.

ARIZONA

Arizona:

Arizona is a bellwether of sorts. The winners of 8 of the last 12 presidential elections have also won the state, which is exactly what Donald Trump did in 2016 and what Joe Biden did in 2020. Now in 2024, Republican Donald Trump is once again in a tense race, this time against Democrat Kamala Harris, to claim Arizona’s 11 electoral votes. But before we make our prediction, let’s find out how the Grand Canyon state has become so important for both parties.

Only gaining statehood in 1912, Arizona was largely a blue state during its early years. But after voting for Republican Dwight Eisenhower in 1952, the state has only voted for a Democratic candidate twice: Bill Clinton in 1996, and, crucially, Joe Biden in 2020. While Biden led Trump in the polls by a sizeable amount, he saw his lead shrink to less than a point by election day, and the results were even closer than that: Biden won the state by 11,057 votes, or just 0.3%. This was a spectacular fall for the Republicans, who won the state by 3.5 points in 2016, and by 9.1 points in 2012. But several signs suggest that they may be able to turn their luck around this November.

For one thing, Arizona is a border state, and the issue of immigration is front and center this election cycle. According to a report by the House Committee on Homeland Security from this April, the United States is on track by the end of the year to reach 10 million encounters at its borders since Joe Biden has taken office. This has had a massive effect on states bordering Mexico, like Arizona. In a recent NY Times/Siena poll, Arizonans ranked immigration as their 2nd most important issue, being beaten out by the economy and followed closely by abortion. 55% of respondents said they believe Donald Trump would do a better job on immigration, while only 42% said Harris would, indicating that the former President is significantly stronger on this hot-button issue. However, Kamala Harris is just as strong on abortion as Donald Trump is on immigration; an identical 55% of respondents say that they prefer the Vice President on this issue, a good sign for her campaign. Additionally, just as Trump and Harris are on the ballot in Arizona, abortion is too. Proposition 139 is an amendment to the state’s constitution on the ballot this November that seeks to provide the fundamental right to abortion up to fetal viability, or about 22 weeks. This measure is very likely to pass, with polls showing that between 60-70% of voters support it. If there is significant turnout, especially by women (a group which Harris wins a majority of in the state), then Harris may be able to overcome Trump’s lead on issues like the economy and immigration.

But perhaps the best sign for Trump in Arizona this time around is the polling; in the past two elections, the former President spent most of the race trailing his opponents in the state. This time, however, he has taken a narrow, but nevertheless meaningful, lead of 1.5 points on Harris. And while mid-August saw the newly selected Democratic candidate overtaking Trump across all 7 swing states, Arizona by far held the firmest, with Harris only holding a lead over Trump in the RealClearPolitics Average for a single day.

With this in mind, we predict that Donald Trump will flip Arizona back to the Republicans this election by between 1 and 2 points. Biden’s narrow 2020 win is unlikely to be replicated by Harris, especially due to her weakness on key issues for Arizonans like the border and the economy.

Once upon a time, Colorado was a solid red state. Then it was a fierce battleground state. And now, the Rocky Mountain state is safely Democratic. After LBJ’s landslide victory of 1964, the residents of Colorado voted red in the next six consecutive elections. But in 1992, the state flipped for Democrat Bill Clinton, who won 40.1% of the vote to George Bush’s 35.9% and Independent Ross Perot’s 23.3%. But this election was greatly influenced by Perot’s dominant third-party run, which siphoned millions of votes away from the incumbent Republican; and thus, in 1996, Colorado flipped back to the Republicans after Bob Dole narrowly defeated Clinton 45.8% to 44.4%, one of only three states to do so.

In both 2000 and 2004, George Bush had slightly greater, but nevertheless close, victories in the state. However, in 2008, Democrat Barack Obama defeated Republican John McCain 53.7% to 44.7%, a margin of 9 points. Since then, the GOP has never been able to regain much ground in the state, with Joe Biden having the greatest performance for a Democrat presidential candidate in Colorado in almost 60 years.

But this election, does Donald Trump have a chance to reverse this trend and come within striking distance of Vice President Kamala Harris in the state? To put it plainly, the news isn’t good for the GOP. Taking a look at the 2022 House elections, Democrats won 55.2% of the vote to the Republicans' 42.5%, the worst performance for the party in Colorado since 2006. Even in the blowout midterm election of 2018, where Democrats picked up 41 House seats, the GOP won 42.96% of the state’s vote, a truly terrible sign for Donald Trump.

So why has Colorado been shifting so quickly to the left? The answer is that it’s likely due to many factors. For one thing, Denver, Colorado’s capital and biggest city, has seen massive population growth in the last 15 years, with the Denver-Aurora Combined Statistical Area increasing from 3.09 million people in 2010 to 3.62 million today. Additionally, Colorado’s booming tech industry, which supports nearly 140,000 jobs, has grown 37% in the last decade and brought tens of thousands of professionals from California cities to the state. This rapid urban growth and influx of highly educated workers to the state has significantly favored the Democrats and has made the largely Republican rural residents a smaller and smaller portion of the voter base.

We predict that Donald Trump will perform roughly in line with his 2020 results in Colorado. Due to the scale of his loss last time and the unpopularity of the Biden-Harris administration, Trump may be able to win some voters back. But the former president is fighting an uphill battle against a massive shift in Colorado’s demographics away from the Republican Party.

WYOMING

Wyoming has the distinction of being the single most Republican state in the nation. Yes, Wyoming barely beat out West Virginia for this title back in 2020, giving a preposterous 69.94% of its vote to Donald Trump. But could former Wyoming Representative Liz Cheney’s and her father’s, former Vice-President Dick Cheney’s, endorsements of Kamala Harris hurt Trump in the state this November?

Since the last presidential election, Liz Cheney, Wyoming’s sole Representative, was primaried by another Republican prior to the 2022 midterms. Cheney was one of the strongest critics of President Donald Trump after the alleged insurrection at the Capitol on January 6th, 2021, and vocally supported his impeachment. Later that year she was appointed the Vice Chair of the House January 6th Committee, which investigated, among other things, Trump’s actions after the 2020 election and up until the day of the riot.

Unsurprisingly, her criticism of Trump made her hated within the Republican Party, and she was primaried by Trump-endorsed candidate, Harriet Hageman; Cheney won just 29% of the vote to Hageman’s 66%. This crushing defeat showed that Wyomingians were willing to swiftly turn on their 3-term representative for going against the Republican Party.

In Wyoming’s 2022 midterms, Hageman received 68.2% of the vote, slightly lower than Trump’s percentage two years prior. Interestingly, when we analyzed the results of the prior elections for Wyoming’s House seat, we found that in 4 of the last 6 elections, the winning candidate, who was always a Republican, received 68% of the vote; during his first run in 2016, Donald Trump also received 68% of the vote.

With a state as tilted Republican as Wyoming, there must be a limit to how well a Republican candidate can possibly perform in the state. We believe Trump has reached this limit. Therefore, we predict that Donald Trump will win Wyoming with an almost identical percentage of the vote to his 2020 run. Perhaps he could crack 70%, but we don’t believe that the former President will be in for any major gains or losses.

MONTANA

Montana is often lumped in with its surrounding states in the Mountain West, in terms of its geography, demographics, and politics. And while Montana shares much of the same DNA with its neighbors, it is not identical. Where states like Wyoming and Idaho are nearly entirely rural, white, and universally Republican, Montana is home to slightly larger metros – Bozeman and Missoula – a slightly more diverse population – including a significant Native American presence – and a significantly more divided political landscape.

Now, Montana has leaned red in presidential elections. Voters have consistently backed the Republican nominee since 1996. In the 2020 election, Donald Trump carried the state with 57% of the vote, continuing the conservative stronghold. 

However, Trump’s 17% margin of victory was notably tighter than his performance across the rest of the Mountain West: as an example, he won Wyoming by nearly 45%.

While Montana has supported Republicans at the presidential level for the past three decades, it is not monolithic. The state’s voters have a history of splitting their tickets, electing Democrats to statewide offices such as the governorship and even a Senate seat.

Tester, who is up for re-election in 2024, is seen as a key player in the Democrats’ hopes of maintaining a presence in the Mountain West. His success often hinges on winning over the state’s rural and working-class voters, who might otherwise lean Republican.

As mentioned earlier, Montana’s electorate is mostly white, with less than 10% of the population identifying as nonwhite, and is predominantly rural. The state’s large stretches of agricultural land and reliance on industries like mining and logging contribute to its conservative leanings. However, Montana’s growing urban areas, such as Bozeman and Missoula, have been trending more progressive, largely due to an influx of younger residents and out-of-state transplants. These areas could play an increasingly important role in shaping the political direction of the state.

Another factor which may affect the state’s dynamics is how national issues resonate with Montanans. While economic concerns, healthcare access, and gun rights remain top priorities, issues like climate change and land conservation also carry weight in the state, where natural resources are a central part of both the economy and the way of life. Abortion rights may also play a role, though Montana’s more libertarian outlook on personal freedoms could mean the state takes a different stance than its conservative peers in the Mountain West.

Additionally, the state’s small but influential Native American population could impact the outcome. Native voters in Montana tend to vote Democratic, and their turnout could be critical in close races, particularly in areas near reservations like those in Glacier and Big Horn counties.

While Democrats face an uphill battle in Montana: there is little doubt about it. But Harris, who boasts strong popularity numbers among working-class and white voters, along with minority groups, may possess the unique traits necessary to resonate with Montana’s idiosyncratic electorate. That being said, the race will undoubtedly be won by Trump, more than likely by a 15% margin.

Located within the heart of Appalachia, West Virginia is a state unlike any other. For starters, it’s one of only two states to form after separating from another state; West Virginia became the 35th state in 1863, after separating from Virginia over the commonwealth’s secession from the Union two years earlier. West Virginia also has the lowest percentage foreign-born population of any state, with just 1.6% of residents being born outside the U.S. Additionally, according to the 2020 Census, a staggering 90% of West Virginians are white, the third-highest percentage in the nation. Finally, the state has the second-highest percentage of residents 65 and older, at 16%.

These demographics explain why West Virginia is also the most conservative state in the nation outside the Mountain West. In 2020, residents overwhelmingly voted for Donald Trump, helping the former president beat Joe Biden by 38.9 points in the state (68.6% to 29.7%); this margin of victory was the second highest of any state in the 2020 election (Wyoming’s being the highest).

So, will West Virginians support Donald Trump in great enough numbers this November to make the Mountain State the most Republican in the nation? West Virginia has gained attention in recent years for its incumbent senator, and former governor, Democrat Joe Manchin. The conservative force in his caucus, Manchin has been a key swing vote in the Senate when it was split 50-50 between Democrats and Republicans after the 2020 elections. Last year, Manchin announced that he won’t seek reelection in 2024, a move which will almost certainly flip his seat to the GOP.

In the 2022 midterms, Republicans in West Virginia performed slightly worse than two years prior, winning 66.1% of House election votes compared to 67.6% in 2020. It should be noted, however, that Democrats also did slightly worse, performing 0.7 points lower in 2022 than in 2020. Regardless, these results show extremely strong support for Republicans in the state and indicate that Trump’s numbers this fall should be similar.

We predict that Donald Trump will win West Virginia, performing slightly better than during his 2020 run. Kamala Harris will struggle to appeal to the state’s overwhelmingly white, working-class voter base and, as a result, can expect to achieve lower numbers than Joe Biden did four years ago.

OKLAHOMA

Existing for 73 years as Indian Territory before finally entering the Union in 1907 as the 46th state, Oklahoma certainly has a unique history. Throughout the 1830s, American Indians living in the Southeastern United States were forcibly removed from their ancestral homelands and forced to migrate to the newly created Indian Territory in what was later called The Trail of Tears. And while this territory remained closed to outside settlers for over half a century, in 1889 its unassigned lands were opened to the public, allowing individuals to claim up to 160 acres if they lived on the land and improved it.

This history gives Oklahoma its demographics today, where 8.4% of the population is Native, the highest percentage in the nation besides Alaska, and 63.5% of the population is White. Oklahoma is also one of the reddest states in the nation. The Sooner State has voted for a Democrat Presidential candidate only once in the last 72 years, LBJ in the election of 1964. In fact, in the 2020 Presidential election only two states had all of their counties go for Trump: West Virginia, and, of course, Oklahoma.

Trump won the state with 65.4% of the vote to Biden’s 32.3%, a margin of 33.1 points. But this victory shouldn’t be at all surprising; every Republican Presidential candidate since 2004 has won Oklahoma with over 65% of the vote; the all-time high for a Republican being Richard Nixon’s 71.8% in the blowout election of 1972.

Despite this, in recent years Republicans have failed to grow their support in the state. In the 2014 midterms, the GOP won a remarkable 70% of the votes in the state’s five House elections, but in three of the four elections since then, their share of the vote has decreased, most recently coming in at 66.36% in 2022. Additionally, in Oklahoma’s 2022 Senate race, Republican incumbent James Lankford defeated Democrat challenger Madison Horn with 64.3% of the vote, over three points less than his previous run in 2016. And while these performances are still significant victories for Republicans, they do show that the party has stagnated in the state.

Finally, while Donald Trump increased his share of the vote by 0.05% from 2016 to 2020, his margin of victory in the state shrunk considerably; Trump won the state by 36.4 points in 2016, but by just 33.1 points four years later. With this in mind, we predict that Donald Trump will win Oklahoma by a similar margin to his 2020 run. You can expect Trump’s margin of victory to fall within the 33 to 36-point range, making it unlikely that he’ll net any massive gains in the state, but making it equally unlikely that Democrat Kamala Harris will make any improvements over her predecessor.

KENTUCKY

Kentucky, the northernmost state of the Bible Belt, has been a solid Republican state in every presidential election since 2000. While its neighbors to the north, Indiana and Ohio, voted for Obama in 2008, the Bluegrass State still gave over 57% of its votes to Republican John McCain. This makes sense, as Kentucky has the third-highest percentage evangelical Protestant population in the nation, at 49%, and Republicans overwhelmingly win this group. In 2020, Donald Trump won 76% of all evangelical voters, which was a decrease from the 80% of the group he won back in 2016.

This 4% decline in performance with evangelicals was a large factor in Trump’s overall worse performance in Kentucky compared to four years prior. Trump finished 30 points above Clinton in 2016 but just 26 points above Biden in 2020, although his percentage of the vote decreased by only 0.4 points (from 62.5% to 62.1%).

So, will Donald Trump be able to win members of this key group of voters back? While Trump stands to benefit from the unpopularity of the Biden administration (Biden’s approval rating with Kentuckians is below 40%), a stronger performance by the former president is not assured; the issue of abortion threatens to hurt Trump and help Kamala Harris. Abortion was made illegal in Kentucky via a trigger law immediately after the overturning of Roe vs. Wade, with no exception for rape or incest. Voters in the state, however, rejected a 2022 referendum that would’ve amended Kentucky’s constitution to deny any protections on abortion. Although the referendum failed narrowly, 48% to 52%, it signals that voters in Kentucky are extremely divided on abortion.

Furthermore, with women in the state leaning slightly more to the left than the right (46% to 44%), Trump will likely have trouble winning even close to half of women voters due to this issue. We predict that Donald Trump will win Kentucky by a slightly smaller margin this November than in 2020, due to backlash from women on the state’s abortion restrictions. Trump’s better performance with evangelical men is likely to be offset by his weaker performance with all women in the state. As a result, Harris will likely perform better in Kentucky than her predecessor did four years ago.

The home of Graceland, Vanderbilt, and the Grand Ole Opry, Tennessee is a state rich in culture and history. The Volunteer State is home to 7.1 million people (the 15th most in the nation) and has had its population more than double since 1960. In fact, Nashville, Tennessee’s capital and largest city, has had its metro population skyrocket in the last 30 years from 1.1 million in 1990 to over 2.1 million people in 2023. Nashville is now America’s 21st largest city, and Memphis, the state’s 2nd largest city, is not far behind at the 29th spot.

Certainly, this urban growth in a once agrarian state would cause a shift in its politics towards the left (like in Tennessee’s neighbor to the east, North Carolina), but it hasn’t turned out that way. GOP support in the state has remained consistently strong; Donald Trump won Tennessee in 2020 by a 23-point margin, securing 60.7% of the vote to Biden’s 37.5%. For comparison, in the same election Trump only won North Carolina by a 1.3 margin.

Interestingly, examining the results of Tennessee’s 2022 midterm elections, we see that out of the state’s nine congressional districts, eight went to the GOP. And although Republicans put up a very solid performance in the House Elections two years ago, winning 64.3% of the total votes and flipping the 5th district, it certainly doesn’t account for their eight out of nine seats… It all comes down to redistricting.

In early 2022, the Tennessee legislature created new congressional district boundaries. The bodies' GOP supermajorities drew and approved new boundaries that significantly favored Republicans, most notably splitting Nashville into three different districts. Separating the Democrat-leaning voters of Nashville into three different house races made certain that the Republicans would win all three. Now Tennessee’s 9th district, containing Memphis, is the only Democrat hold in this Republican-dominated state.

With all this in mind, we predict that Donald Trump will win Tennessee by a slightly greater margin than in 2020. Tennessee’s midterm elections demonstrate strong GOP support, the highest levels in state history, and Trump will certainly ride this momentum to cement even greater gains in the Volunteer State.

VIRGINIA

The Commonwealth of Virginia certainly has a rich history. The birthplace of a whopping eight Presidents, including founding fathers George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe, Old Dominion was the most populated and influential state at our nation’s founding. During the Civil War, Richmond, Virginia, served as the capital of the Confederate States of America, with the state seeing action in the battles of Bull Run, Fredericksburg, and Chancellorsville, among others.

After the Union was victorious and Virginia was readmitted, the state spent the next 72 years voting for Democratic Presidential candidates, besides taking a break in the election of 1928 by voting for Republican Herbert Hoover. However, in 1952, it turned red for Republican Dwight Eisenhower and remained that way (minus Democrat LBJ’s landslide 1964 victory) up until 2004, although it was a swing state in those final years.

In 2008, the state at long last returned to the Democratic Party, voting for Democrat Barack Obama over Republican John McCain 52.6% to 46.3%. Since then, the Republican Party has struggled to win back the once solid red state, with Republican Donald Trump most recently finishing 10.1 points behind Democrat Joe Biden.

But could things be different this November? With a popular Republican governor and an almost evenly split House delegation, Virginia may just become a battleground state once more. The rise of Glenn Youngkin as Governor of Virginia was certainly an unlikely one. In 2021, the relatively unknown businessman ran as a Republican, beating out the state’s former Democratic Governor Terry McAuliffe 50.6% to 48.6% in what was considered a minor upset; McAuliffe had led Youngkin in the polls up until the week of the election. This also marked the first time since 2009 that a Republican had won a statewide election in Virginia.

In his first three years on the job, Youngkin has become extremely popular, earning an approval rating of 57% in a recent poll, including a 62% rating with Independents. Since Virginia has been relatively blue for going on 20 years, polls in the state have been taken few and far between. However, according to the FiveThirtyEight polling average, which unfortunately only includes 10 of them, Democrat Kamala Harris is up 7.6 points on Donald Trump, 50.4% to 42.8%. And despite the unreliability of this metric, we believe that this margin is relatively accurate.

With growing Republican support in the state led by the popular Glenn Youngkin, we predict that although Kamala Harris will carry Virginia, it will be a narrower margin than Joe Biden did in 2020. So, expect a Harris victory of between 7 and 9 points.

ARKANSAS

Arkansas may be the most forgettable state in the South, but its political history is actually one of the most interesting in the region. For one thing, Arkansans chose the Democratic Presidential candidate in 100% of elections from 1876 (the end of Reconstruction) through 1964 (the passage of the Civil Rights Act), no other state has that distinction. But since 1964, Arkansas has only voted blue thrice, once for Jimmy Carter (in 1976), and twice for former Governor Bill Clinton (in 1992 and 1996).

So, can Arkansas, once the solidest state in the Solid South, turn out this time for Kamala Harris? In 2020, Donald Trump won 62.4% of the vote in the Natural State, the highest percentage in any southern state (except Oklahoma). While Joe Biden finished with 34.8% of the vote, it was still an improvement over how Hillary Clinton, the former Arkansas first lady, performed four years prior (she got just 33.7%). Arkansas also was one of only seven states where Trump grew his margin of victory from 2016 to 2020, albeit very slightly (from 26.9 to 27.6%).

This coming election, Trump will have a key ally in Arkansas’s governorship, Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Sanders was Trump’s former press secretary and is the daughter of Mike Huckabee, who also served as Arkansas’s governor from 1996-2007. Sanders handily won election in 2022 with 63% of the vote, and in those same elections, Republicans won 70% of all House votes in the state (although this number is partially inflated due to them running unopposed in the state’s 1st district).

A good indicator of Trump’s potential performance this November is Arkansas’s 2nd congressional district, which includes most of Little Rock (the capital and largest city) and its suburbs, and is also the least Republican district in the state. In 2022, incumbent Republican French Hill won 60% of the vote, up from when he won 55% in 2020. These gains in the suburbs for Republicans indicate that Trump has room to build on his 27.6% margin victory.

Unfortunately for Harris, Arkansas doesn’t have the Black population of other deep South states (which is why it’s the most Republican). Only 12.4% of the population is Black, which is even under the national average. So, while Harris may perform stronger with Blacks in Arkansas (but even that remains to be seen), this will likely be offset by Trump’s stronger performance with the state’s suburban voters. Thus, we predict Donald Trump will build on his margin of victory in 2020 and win Arkansas with upwards of 63% of the vote.

OKLAHOMA

Existing for 73 years as Indian Territory before finally entering the Union in 1907 as the 46th state, Oklahoma certainly has a unique history. Throughout the 1830s, American Indians living in the Southeastern United States were forcibly removed from their ancestral homelands and forced to migrate to the newly created Indian Territory in what was later called The Trail of Tears. And while this territory remained closed to outside settlers for over half a century, in 1889 its unassigned lands were opened to the public, allowing individuals to claim up to 160 acres if they lived on the land and improved it.

This history gives Oklahoma its demographics today, where 8.4% of the population is Native, the highest percentage in the nation besides Alaska, and 63.5% of the population is White. Oklahoma is also one of the reddest states in the nation. The Sooner State has voted for a Democrat Presidential candidate only once in the last 72 years, LBJ in the election of 1964. In fact, in the 2020 Presidential election, only two states had all of their counties go for Trump: West Virginia and, of course, Oklahoma.

Trump won the state with 65.4% of the vote to Biden’s 32.3%, a margin of 33.1 points. But this victory shouldn’t be at all surprising; every Republican Presidential candidate since 2004 has won Oklahoma with over 65% of the vote; the all-time high for a Republican being Richard Nixon’s 71.8% in the blowout election of 1972. Despite this, in recent years, Republicans have failed to grow their support in the state. In the 2014 midterms, the GOP won a remarkable 70% of the votes in the state’s five House elections, but in three of the four elections since then, their share of the vote has decreased, most recently coming in at 66.36% in 2022.

Additionally, in Oklahoma’s 2022 Senate race, Republican incumbent James Lankford defeated Democrat challenger Madison Horn with 64.3% of the vote, over three points less than his previous run in 2016. And while these performances are still significant victories for Republicans, they do show that the party has stagnated in the state. Finally, while Donald Trump increased his share of the vote by 0.05% from 2016 to 2020, his margin of victory in the state shrunk considerably; Trump won the state by 36.4 points in 2016, but by just 33.1 points four years later.

With this in mind, we predict that Donald Trump will win Oklahoma by a similar margin to his 2020 run. You can expect Trump’s margin of victory to fall within the 33 to 36-point range, making it unlikely that he’ll net any massive gains in the state, but making it equally unlikely that Democrat Kamala Harris will make any improvements over her predecessor.

TEXAS

If there was ever a single state which might determine the future of electoral politics and our two-party system as we know it, that state would likely be Texas. With 40 electoral votes and a steady Democratic trendline through the 21st century, the one-time Republican stronghold has situated itself in the competitive arena – albeit, at the outer rim of it. 

Texas has consistently supported Republican candidates since Ronald Reagan’s victory in 1980. But over the last 25 years, a transformation has taken form. In 2000, Republican George W. Bush won the state by a 21.4% margin over Democrat Al Gore. But by 2020, Donald Trump only won the state by 5.6% over Joe Biden. Over 20 years, Texas experienced a 15-point shift to the left – one of the largest shifts across the nation, and similar to those experienced in states like Arizona and Georgia, which voted for Democrats for the first time in 2020.

One of the most significant demographic changes fueling this shift is the growth of Texas' Hispanic population, which now makes up nearly 40% of the state's residents. While Hispanic voters are not monolithic, they have leaned more Democratic in recent elections, especially in urban areas. This growing demographic, along with significant Black and Asian American communities, has helped bolster Democratic support in Texas’ cities. 

Suburban areas, once strongholds for the GOP, have also shown signs of shifting left, particularly in the counties surrounding Dallas and Houston. This trend is driven by demographic changes and disaffection among suburban women and college-educated voters, many of whom have grown weary of the more populist and divisive rhetoric coming from the national GOP.

Texas is geographically and politically divided between its rural, conservative regions and its urban, more liberal cities. The state's rural areas, particularly in West Texas and the Panhandle, remain strong Republican bastions, where issues such as gun rights, energy policy, and immigration resonate deeply with voters. Meanwhile, urban areas like Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, and Austin have grown increasingly Democratic, with diverse populations, younger voters, and college-educated professionals driving this trend.

Looking at the topline, one might ask: if Georgia and Arizona have become tossups, what’s stopping Texas from doing so?

For every demographic and region fueling Democratic hopes, there is one favoring Republicans. Starting off: while the state’s cities and suburbs had undergone a massive leftward shift from 2000 to 2016, there is some evidence that these movements have slowed. For instance, Harris county – which contains Houston and its surrounding suburbs – shifted less than 2 points leftward between 2016 and 2020, while it had undergone a 12-point shift between 2016 and 2020. This doesn’t mean Democrats are in danger of losing ground; rather, they have hit (or are close to hitting) a ceiling with these groups of voters. Additionally, while Hispanic voters (mainly in densely-populated metros) have indeed bolstered the Democratic coalition, the ethnic group is not monolithic: many Hispanic voters in South Texas and the Rio Grande Valley have bolted rightward during the Trump era, likely resulting from a combination of social conservatism and support for Trump’s advocacy for border control – an issue they (literally) hold near and dear.

Looking ahead to 2024, Texas will likely remain a focal point for both parties. Democrats will aim to build on their recent gains in urban and suburban areas, focusing on mobilizing younger, more diverse voters. Republicans, on the other hand, will seek to maintain their dominance in rural areas while solidifying their appeal to suburban voters who may be concerned about the state of the economy and public safety. But ultimately, Republicans will likely emerge victorious: Trump has built a durable 6-point lead in the polls, a number which is comparable to the 2020 results and would be logical in a national environment similar to that year (which seems to be where we’re heading).

Alabama, the home of the Crimson Tide and the heart of Dixie, is predictably an extremely conservative state. In the 2020 Presidential election, 62% of residents cast their votes for Donald Trump, while only 36.6% did so for Joe Biden. Trump's performance was strikingly similar to his 2016 run, where he won with 62.1% of the vote. These two races were the best ever by a Republican Presidential candidate in the state, besides George Bush in the 2004 election.

Since 1964, Alabamans have only voted for a Democratic candidate once, fellow southerner Jimmy Carter in 1976. However, Alabama did join other deep South states in voting for their infamous segregationist governor, George Wallace, in his 1968 run on the American Independent Party ticket.

But today, 56 years later, the most famous name in Alabama politics is their senator, former college football coach Tommy Tuberville. Going up against incumbent Doug Jones in 2020, Tuberville cruised to victory with 60.1% of the vote. The fact that Jones, a Democrat, was even elected to Alabama’s Senate seat in the first place is a story of its own. During a 2017 special election, his Republican opponent Roy Moore was accused of sexually assaulting several women, including two underage girls, a month out from election day. As a result, Moore lost narrowly, 48.3% to 50%, to Jones.

So, in 2020, with Tuberville not having the baggage Moore had 3 years prior, he was able to handily defeat the Democrat Jones. Since taking office, Tuberville became infamous for his blockage of military nominations in protest of the Department of Defense’s policy to grant leave and reimburse travel costs for servicewomen seeking out-of-state abortions. From February through December of 2023, Tuberville held all Department of Defense nominations, blocking over 450 promotions and leaving the Marine Corps, Army, and Navy without leaders. Although Tuberville eventually relented on his hold in the final weeks of the year, this stunt certainly damaged his reputation, but it isn’t likely to hurt the GOP’s performance in Alabama in the long run.

In fact, according to the 2022 midterm elections, Republicans are doing better than ever in the Cotton State, receiving 70.1% of the vote in the state’s house races. Additionally, in the state’s senate election, Republican Katie Britt beat Democrat Will Boyd 66.6% to 30.9%, a sizable improvement from the retiring six-term Republican Richard Shelby’s performance of 64% of the vote in 2016.

With this in mind, we predict that Donald Trump will win Alabama with a significantly higher percentage of the vote than in 2020. If the former president can even come close to matching the GOP’s performance in the midterm elections two years back, he can count on big gains in this deep southern state.

LOUISIANA

In the new millennium, Louisiana voters have opted for the Republican Presidential candidate 100% of the time. The once swing state is now solidly red, with the GOP increasing their popular vote percentage in six of the last seven presidential elections.

So, will history repeat itself once again? And will Donald Trump eke out even more gains in the already MAGA-heavy state this November?

The culture war is in full swing in Louisiana; there’s no better example of this than the law passed this past spring requiring the Ten Commandments to be displayed in every public school classroom in the state. Needless to say, this law was met with fervor by all believers in the separation of church and state, and legal challenges have already been mounted by the ACLU to get it struck down. But Louisiana isn’t a part of the Bible Belt for nothing, so it remains to be seen whether this battle will alienate the state’s more moderate voters.

But there’s still good news for the Republicans; if this election turns out at all like the 2022 midterms, then Donald Trump can expect big gains in the Pelican State. To put it simply, the GOP absolutely demolished the Democrats two years back. Republicans won over 68% of the votes in the house races compared to a paltry 28% for the Democrats. This was an admirable 7% increase in vote share (only 61% of house votes went red in 2020).

All in all, we think Donald Trump will ever so slightly be able to increase his vote share in Louisiana. Kamala Harris may have a better chance to rally the state’s over 30% Black population, but it’s unlikely to make a dent in Trump’s performance. So, without any divine intervention, it seems this November Louisiana will go solidly Republican.

SOUTH CAROLINA

One of the most consistent states in the nation, South Carolina is always on the verge of becoming a swing state, but never makes it there. The Palmetto State has voted red in every election since 1980; and in the last four Presidential elections, the Republican candidate has won South Carolina with between 53.9% to 55.1% of the vote, a range of 1.2 points.

Interestingly, in the other Carolina, things are even more steady. In the last four Presidential elections, the Republican share of the vote has ranged from 49.4% to 50.4%, a range of just a single point. While voters in both states have stayed anchored to the Republican party, albeit by significantly slimmer margins in North Carolina, does Kamala Harris have a chance to change that this November?

The Vice President’s greatest advantage in South Carolina is her strength with Black voters. With the chance to be the first Black woman elected to the Presidency, Harris needs to perform well with the state’s 26% African American population. Famously, back in February of 2020, Joe Biden won the South Carolina primary with a 28.88-point victory over the front runner for the nomination at the time, Bernie Sanders. This win reenergized a campaign that had been a disappointment up to that point, propelling Biden to win the nomination and eventually the White House. The only thing that made this possible was Biden’s strength with the Black voters of South Carolina. In 2020, 92% of Black voters cast their votes for Democrat candidate Joe Biden.

But in 2024, these numbers appear to be much lower for Harris. In recent polling, Donald Trump has shown significant improvement with Black voters, receiving 16% support compared to 79% for the Vice President. While Harris is still leading Trump by 63 points, if these numbers hold, the former president will have doubled his support with this crucial group of South Carolinian voters.

Turning our attention to the 2022 midterm election results, it doesn’t get any rosier for Harris. The GOP absolutely dominated in South Carolina’s seven house races. Not only did Republicans run unopposed in two districts, but in all five others, they had significant improvements. Most impressively, in the predominantly African American district of Democratic congressman and former House Majority Whip, Jim Clyburn, Republican challenger Dave Buckner delivered a stunning improvement for the GOP, winning 37.9% of the vote, seven points more than the Republican candidate in 2020 did.

With this in mind, we predict that Donald Trump will win South Carolina by a greater margin than he did four years ago. Kamala Harris is unlikely to win greater support from Black voters, which will make her path to gains in the state highly challenging. The former president should expect a massive improvement in South Carolina so long as he can even come close to matching the Republicans' midterm performance.

MISSISSIPPI

This upcoming election in Mississippi might not hold immediate national consequences, but it may determine the trajectory of a state – and region – which has long supported Republicans but shows sparks of hope for Democrats. 

The Magnolia State is known for its strong conservative lean: since Ronald Reagan’s landslide victory in 1980, the state has given its electoral votes to the Republican nominee in every presidential election. In 2020, Donald Trump secured over 57% of the vote, continuing the conservative trend.

As with other racially-polarized states in the South, Mississippi’s partisan composition very closely mirrors that of its demographics: nearly 60% of its population is white, while the remaining 40% is predominantly Black.

Several factors could influence the 2024 election in Mississippi. First, voter turnout will play a critical role. Historically, turnout in the state has been lower than the national average, particularly among Black voters in rural areas and urban centers like Jackson. Additionally, Trump has seemingly improved his standing among Black male voters since 2020, according to recent polling of the current race. Whether Democrat Kamala Harris is able to mobilize voters and stymie this supposed bleeding is an open question – and one that will likely remain unanswered until November 5th.

Another element to watch is how national political trends filter down into Mississippi: issues like broadband access, medicare expansion, and widespread economic inequality could shift political dynamics in Mississippi – particularly in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, which disproportionately affected working-class and minority residents of the state. Additionally, abortion rights may mobilize certain segments of the population, as Mississippi was at the center of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in the Dobbs ruling. However, a vast majority of Mississippi residents on both sides of the partisan spectrum identify as Protestant Christians – a group which leans conservative on abortion and other social issues.

As Democrats face declining fortunes in regions such as the Midwest, Mississippi – and the South as a whole – presents an interesting and important opportunity for the party. But until they invest the same strategies, time, and resources into the Magnolia State as they did in Georgia, Mississippi will remain staunchly Republican. 2024 is no different: we predict Trump will win the state by a margin between 15% and 20%.

FLORIDA

Florida, where woke goes to die? More like Florida, where Democrats’ hopes go to die… Let us turn back the clock to the infamous Presidential Election of 2000, between Incumbent Democrat Vice President Al Gore and Republican George W. Bush. This election proved to be one of the closest in American history, and as the night went on and turned into the next day, one thing became clear: it’d all come down to Florida. The state had shifted from being called for Gore early in the evening to being called for Bush, which made him the winner. However, after Gore had called Bush to concede, Florida was once again moved, this time from Bush to the undecided category, prompting Gore to withdraw his concession.

At this point, Bush led Gore by slightly under 2,000 votes and a statewide recount was ordered. After the recount, Bush’s lead shrunk to just over 300 votes, although it later increased to 930 votes after overseas ballots were counted. What happened next is still fiercely debated to this day. But hanging chads or no hanging chads, Bush was declared the winner of Florida’s 25 electoral votes by the United States Supreme Court that December, and thus the entire election.

This 537-vote margin of victory for the Republicans in 2000 will certainly be greater this November. Four years ago, in 2020, despite Democrat Joe Biden leading Republican Donald Trump by 1 point in the state’s Real Clear Politics polling average, Trump went on to win Florida 51.22% to 47.86%, a margin of 3.4 points. Florida was one of only seven states that Trump won by a greater margin in 2020 than in his prior run; he carried it by just 1.2 points in 2016. So even though Trump lost the general election to Biden, his victory in Florida was significant; it signaled that the state was no longer purple, but that it was red.

In this election cycle, Florida, for the first time in 36 years, isn’t being considered a swing state. This makes sense, as all you have to do is look at the 2022 midterms. While nationally the GOP underperformed, in Florida they absolutely destroyed the Democrats. They won 58.3% of the vote in all the state’s House races, an increase of 6.2 points from their 2020 performance. And perhaps more notably, in the Gubernatorial election, Republican incumbent Ron DeSantis beat former Republican Governor turned Democrat candidate Charlie Crist in a landslide victory. DeSantis, who had gained national attention for his battle against Covid Lockdowns, Vaccine Mandates, and the so-called “Woke Ideology,” performed significantly better than during his first run for Governor in 2018, where he won the election by just 0.4 points.

And while since his reelection DeSantis launched a failed bid for the Republican nomination for President and has seen a massive decrease in popularity, he is merely a product of Florida’s shift to the right, not the cause of it. Today, Trump is up 8.4 points on Harris in Florida according to the Real Clear Politics polling average, and we find this number to likely prove accurate. Trump will certainly win Florida; the once prized swing state is now safely Republican. And although his margin of victory will almost definitely be less than the GOP’s in the 2022 midterms, it will also almost unquestionably be greater than in the 2020 race. Therefore, we predict Trump will win Florida by a margin of 6-9 points, roughly in line with the polls.

While not a particularly exciting state geographically, Nebraska is certainly a very exciting state electorally. Yes, the Cornhusker State is one of only two states (the other being Maine) that splits its electoral votes: two votes are awarded to the state’s overall popular vote winner, and the remaining three are distributed between the popular vote winners in the state’s three congressional districts. This unique system was created by a 1991 law, and up until the 2008 Presidential election, it didn’t change anything; the Republican presidential candidate, by finishing first in all three congressional districts, won all five of Nebraska’s votes.

But all of that changed in 2008 when Barack Obama won Nebraska’s 2nd congressional district, which includes Omaha. Suddenly, a very Republican state, that had only gone blue in one presidential election since 1940, was awarding an electoral vote to the Democrats, all because of the politics of its largest city. Although Romney flipped the 2nd district back to the Republicans in 2012, and Donald Trump won it too four years later, in 2020, the district once again went to a Democrat, Joe Biden.

This election cycle, Trump’s victory may hinge on winning Nebraska’s 2nd district. In fact, it represents Trump’s only viable road to the White House that doesn’t require the Rust Belt. If the former President flips only Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada on election day, he loses to Kamala Harris, 270-268. But if he can win the 2nd district, then the two candidates tie in the electoral college, and the House’s Republican majority gets to select a winner, which, unsurprisingly, will be Trump.

Statewide, Republican support in Nebraska remains steady. In the 2022 House elections, the GOP won 62.71% of the vote, almost identical to their performances in both 2020 and 2018. And although Nebraska remains solidly red, this is not a good sign for Trump; his support appears to have stagnated in the state, which makes flipping the 2nd district an uphill battle.

Therefore, we predict that Donald Trump will perform very similarly in Nebraska to his 2020 run. And, as a result, we can expect Kamala Harris to hold on to the 2nd district, thereby avoiding an electoral tie.

SOUTH DAKOTA

Although not as Republican as its neighbor to the north, South Dakota is certainly a bright red state, nonetheless. The home of Mount Rushmore voted for Donald Trump by a 26-point margin; Trump won with 61.8% of the vote to Biden’s 35.6%. And while you may not know much about South Dakotan politics, you probably know Governor Kristi Noem (yes, the lady who shot her dog).

Noem was first elected in 2018, in South Dakota’s closest gubernatorial election since 1986. She barely beat the Democrat candidate, former professional bronc rider and Minority Leader of the South Dakota senate, Billie Sutton. Noem finished the race with 51% of the vote, and Sutton finished second with a commendable 47.6% of the vote. Noem’s victory made her the first female governor of South Dakota and extended the longest active hold on a governorship by one party; the GOP has controlled the governor’s office in the state since 1978.

With the presidential election coming up this November, Donald Trump will certainly win South Dakota. So, what chance does he have to increase his victory in the state?

In 2022, South Dakota had a gubernatorial, Senate, and House election. In the governor’s race, Noem performed significantly better than in her first election, receiving 62% of the vote to her Democrat challenger’s 35.2%. In the Senate election, incumbent Republican John Thune cruised to his 4th victory with 69.6% of the vote. Thune, however, did perform slightly worse than in his last election; he received 71.8% of the vote back in 2016. In South Dakota’s at-large House district election, Republican Dusty Johnson was reelected to his 3rd term with 77.4% of the vote. Curiously, Johnson had no Democratic challenger in either his 2022 or 2020 race, instead running against two different libertarian candidates. Nevertheless, Johnson (like Thune) performed worse than his last run, with Johnson’s share of the vote declining by 3.6 points from 2020.

So, although Kristi Noem had a big victory in the 2022 midterms, it was largely due to her facing a weaker Democrat opponent than she did four years prior. In fact, 2022 was an overall worse year for the GOP in South Dakota than 2020 was. With this in mind, we predict that Donald Trump will win South Dakota roughly in line with his 2020 numbers.

NORTH DAKOTA

North Dakota is an often-overlooked Great Plains state. While its sister to the south has Mount Rushmore, the only thing the Roughrider State has is a tapped-out oil boom and a governor who was almost Trump’s running mate. So, what chance does Kamala Harris have in a state that resoundingly voted for Donald Trump in 2020? The answer is probably not a very big one.

To start, Trump won North Dakota by a menacing 33 points four years ago (65% to 32%); this was a two-point improvement over his 2016 run, although his margin of victory was 2.3 points lower. But since 2020, Republicans have shown slight weakness in the state. Again, we must turn to the 2022 midterm election to see how the GOP performed in North Dakota. Two years ago, John Hoeven, who was also the state’s governor from 2000-2010, ran for his third term in the Senate. And while in 2014 Hoeven won an absolutely mind-boggling 78.6% of the vote to his Democratic challenger’s 17% (a freakish margin of 61.6 points), in 2022 Hoeven only won 56.4% of the vote in a three-way race, the Democrat and Independent opponents getting 25% and 18.5% of the vote, respectively. Although the independent candidate likely siphoned a significant amount of votes away from Hoeven, this was still an embarrassing decline in performance for a politician who had been a dominant force in the state for over 20 years.

So does this spell trouble for Donald Trump this November? With the glory days of North Dakota’s oil boom behind it, perhaps the Republican dominance in the state will also go bust. As the oil ceases to flow like it used to, production peaked back in 2019, the state’s phenomenal economic growth over the last two decades will no longer be able to keep pace. So as North Dakotans become weary of voting Republican, Trump may have trouble maintaining his 2020 margin of victory.

All things considered, we predict Trump will win North Dakota by roughly 30 points, slightly lower than four years ago, but nonetheless a landslide.

As President Biden spends his remaining months in office on Rehoboth Beach, this November, residents of Delaware will no longer be voting for one of their own. Will Kamala Harris be able to match the impressive results Joe Biden put up four years ago in the First State? We find it unlikely that the vice president will outdo the extraordinary 58.7% of the vote that Mr. Biden garnered in 2020. Delaware voters just won’t be as eager to turn out for Harris as they would have for President Biden, who has served the residents of his state for over 50 years. This isn’t to say that Harris won’t finish above Trump by double-digit points (she will).

Delaware, a former slave state, has a sizeable Black population, the 8th highest by percent in the nation at 22.5% of its population. Will Harris be able to tap into this pool of voters more effectively than her predecessor? Prior to dropping out, Biden was projected to win the lowest percentage of Black voters for a Democratic candidate in over 60 years, spelling disaster for his reelection chances. While Joe’s ouster and replacement with Kamala Harris, who would be the first Black woman to hold the presidency, will likely bolster the party’s support with Black Americans, it’s unlikely that Harris will even reach Biden’s performance with these voters in 2020; nevertheless, Harris certainly has room for growth with Black voters before Election Day, and her outperformance in a state like Delaware would be reflective of this.

Taking these factors into account, we believe that Harris’ results in Delaware will be in line with Hillary’s 53.4% of the vote to Trump’s 41.9% back in 2016.

MARYLAND

Maryland is the third bluest state in the nation, beaten only slightly for that second spot by Massachusetts (but still a ways behind Vermont). A Republican Presidential candidate has only won Maryland thrice since 1960, in the landslide elections of Nixon, Reagan, and Bush, in 1972, 1984, and 1988, respectively. In 2020, Joe Biden absolutely dominated in the state, receiving more than double Donald Trump’s votes; Biden finished with 65.4% of the vote to Trump’s 32.2%. This was a significantly stronger performance than in 2016, when Hillary Clinton only received 60.3%.

Surely a state as solid blue as Maryland wouldn’t have an extremely popular Republican in office, but it did; from 2015 through 2023, Republican Larry Hogan served as governor. At the same time Democrats were having their best elections in the history of the state, Hogan was becoming one of the most popular governors in the country. In the last year of his term, he had an approval rating of 70%. And since leaving office, Hogan has turned his eyes towards Maryland’s soon-to-be-vacant Senate seat. Incumbent Democrat Senator Ben Cardin is retiring after three terms, leaving his seat up for grabs.

This November, while Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are engaged in a tight race for the presidency, Hogan and his Democrat opponent Angela Alsobrooks are duking it out for this seat. And although Alsobrooks holds a 5-point lead over Hogan in recent polling, you can’t count the former Governor out just yet. Many Marylanders voting for Kamala Harris will split their ballot and vote for Hogan, but it remains to be seen just how many actually will.

However, it doesn’t remain to be seen whether Kamala Harris will have a major victory in Maryland this fall, she will. Yet, it’s not all good news for Harris; in the state’s 2022 House elections, Democrats received 64.71% of the total vote, slightly lower than two years prior, and also a point under Joe Biden’s performance in 2020. This Democrat stagnation in the midterms mixed with a popular Republican down ballot is likely to help Trump make modest gains in the state. Therefore, we predict that Kamala Harris will win Maryland by a slightly smaller margin than Biden did four years ago. And while Trump may do slightly better, Harris will still dominate in this mid-Atlantic state.

NEW YORK

Please excuse the length of this article because we’ve finally gotten to our home state: The Empire State. We certainly have many opinions about New York and its politics, but we will try to keep it as brief and as unbiased as possible. New York, the home of West Point, Niagara Falls, and The Big Apple. Yes, the politics of New York state are obviously dominated by New York City. NYC is by far and away the largest city in the United States, with over 8.2 million residents (LA is second with 3.8 million). If you add Long Island’s Nassau and Suffolk counties (which have 1.4 and 1.53 million people, respectively), and NYC’s neighbors to the north of Rockland and Westchester counties (339,000 and 990,000 people, respectively), the population of downstate New York balloons to a staggering 12.5 million people.

With the entire population of New York coming in at 19.68 million people, the downstaters certainly have a majority of the voting power. In the 2020 election, Joe Biden easily won the state, receiving 60.9% of the vote to Donald Trump’s 37.7%. Breaking down the results by counties, Biden won an eyepopping 86.8%, 83.5%, 77%, and 72.2% of the vote, in New York (Manhattan), Bronx, Kings (Brooklyn), and Queens counties, respectively. Lucky for the King of New York, Donald Trump, to save some of his pride, he did win Richmond County (Staten Island) by 15 points and squeaked through in Suffolk County, Long Island, winning by 232 votes (out of 762,274 total votes cast).

In upstate New York, Trump performed solidly, except in the counties of Erie (Buffalo), Monroe (Rochester), Onondaga (Syracuse), and Albany. An interesting development in the state of New York since 2020 was the resignation of three-term Governor Andrew Cuomo for sexual misconduct, placing Democrat Lieutenant Governor Kathy Hochul in charge. After serving out the rest of Cuomo’s term, Hochul faced an extremely tough challenger, Republican Lee Zeldin. A congressman from New York’s first congressional district (the eastern two-thirds of Suffolk County, Long Island), Zeldin performed stronger in New York’s Gubernatorial Election than any Republican since 2002. Despite not winning the race, he received 46.8% of the vote to Hochul’s 53.2%; for comparison, in 2018 Cuomo won 59.6% of the vote.

This strong performance by Zeldin helped Republican House candidates flip three New York House seats in the midterms (one-third of all seats flipped by the GOP that entire election cycle) and signaled that the Republican party is alive and well in The Empire State. Therefore, we predict that Donald Trump will perform significantly better in New York this November. If the former president can even come close to the Republicans’ 2022 midterm performance, where they won 43.9% of all House votes in the state, then The Donald will have a massive improvement from his 2020 performance.

NEW JERSEY

New Jersey is an often-overlooked state. As a suburb of two iconic American cities: New York and Philadelphia, it is the only state in the nation to have every one of its counties deemed urban by the U.S. Census Bureau. Yes, New Jersey crams a whopping 9.3 million people into 8,722 square miles, making it the 9th largest state by population, but also the 4th smallest by area. This gives the Garden State the title of the most densely populated state in the nation.

The tightly packed residents of this state generally lean to the left; in 2020, 57.3% of Jerseyites voted for Democrat Joe Biden, while only 41.4% voted for the Republican Donald Trump (a 16-point margin). This performance by Trump was the best of any Republican Presidential candidate since John McCain in 2008, who received an almost identical 41.6% of the vote. To find the last time a Republican was even competitive in New Jersey, you have to go back another four years to 2004, where George Bush lost to John Kerry by just 6.7 points.

Today, however, the state remains relatively blue, but probably less so than you think. In the past decade, Republican House candidates have performed surprisingly well in such a Democrat-leaning state as New Jersey. In the 2014 House elections, Republicans received 48.17% of the vote and won 6 out of 12 of the state’s seats (this was a year after 60% of residents voted to reelect Republican Governor Chris Christie). And although the GOP’s support crumbled in 2018, when they won just 38.7% of the vote and lost four of their House seats, they bounced back in 2020 and 2022, winning 41.58% and 44.46% of the vote, respectively.

Despite several polls conducted in late June and early July showing Trump either leading or narrowly trailing Biden in New Jersey, the current President’s replacement, Kamala Harris, is certainly not at risk of losing the state. And even though Trump isn’t competitive in the Garden State, that doesn’t mean that Democrats have won over any of its voters in the last four years (they haven’t). You can expect many suburban voters dissatisfied with the Biden Administration’s performance on issues like immigration and the economy to turn their eyes towards Trump.

For this reason, we predict that although Kamala Harris will win New Jersey this November, it will be by a sizably smaller margin than what Joe Biden won by in 2020.

California, the home of Kamala Harris, is both the nation’s most populated and one of its bluest states. In 2020, over 11 million Californians cast votes for Joe Biden (almost 14% of all votes he received). Democrats have won the Golden State in every presidential election since 1992; and in that time, they’ve consistently grown their support. So will former senator Harris win big in California this November, or will Donald Trump move the state towards the GOP?

In the 2022 midterms, only one of California’s whopping 52 house seats flipped to the GOP, a decrease from the three seats gained in the 2020 house elections. But in 2022, Republicans received 2.5% more of the vote (statewide) than they did two years prior, going from 33.7% to 36.22%. For comparison, in 2020 Donald Trump received 34.3% of the vote, losing the election to Biden by 29 points. Therefore, if Donald Trump is able to replicate the Republican gains during the midterms, there may be potential for him to eat into Harris’ margin of victory.

Another factor to consider are the results of California’s 2022 gubernatorial race. Just 16 years after electing the Terminator to the Governorship, Californians chose to reelect Gavin Newsom. First elected back in 2018, Newsom handily survived a 2021 recall attempt, with 62% of voters seeking to keep him in office. In 2022, he performed worse than the state’s incumbent Democrat senator, Alex Padilla, receiving 59% of the vote compared to Padilla’s 61.1%. Since his reelection, Newsom’s approval rating has fallen below 50%, with a recent Public Policy Institute of California poll placing it at 44% (Joe Biden received a 42% rating in that same poll).

As a result of Governor Newsom’s unpopularity, many California voters may be scared away from supporting Harris this fall. We predict that although Kamala Harris will win California in a landslide, off the back of the GOP’s growing support in the state and the Governor’s shrinking popularity, her margin of victory over Donald Trump will be lower than Joe Biden’s in 2020.

NEW MEXICO

New Mexico is a state unlike any other. The Land of Enchantment was the 47th state to enter the Union, is the 5th largest by area, 36th by population, and has the highest percentage Latino population in the nation. Yes, a whopping 47.7% of New Mexico’s population is Latino, and another 10% is Native American, the 2nd highest behind Alaska. These demographics make New Mexico one of five Majority-minority states (the others being California, Hawaii, Texas, and Maryland) and leave only 36.5% of the population as Non-Hispanic White.

These unique demographics give Hispanics and Native Americans an outsized influence on New Mexican politics, and in recent years these voters have supported the Democratic party. In 2020, Joe Biden carried the state with 54.3% of the vote, the best finish since Barack Obama in 2008, and Donald Trump finished a distant second at 43.5%. Both parties received a greater percentage of the vote in 2020 than in 2016, due to Libertarian Candidate Gary Johnson, the former governor of New Mexico, siphoning an impressive 9.3% of the vote in that election.

However, Biden’s margin of victory, at 10.8 points, is a massive improvement for the Democrats; only 20 years ago, New Mexico was perhaps the closest swing state in the nation. In 2004, Incumbent Republican George Bush narrowly defeated Democrat John Kerry 49.8% to 49.1% in New Mexico, flipping the state red for the first time since 1988. And four years earlier, in the election of 2000, Democrat Al Gore defeated Bush in the state by 366 votes, making the margin of victory in New Mexico that election even smaller than in Florida, where the results were famously disputed.

The glory days for Republicans in New Mexico have long since passed, and the state is no longer regarded as a key battleground state. But this election, as Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are in a dead heat for the White House, the results in The Land of Enchantment may be closer than you think. Trump is performing significantly better with Latino voters this election cycle than in 2016 or 2020. A recent national NBC poll found that 40% of registered Latino voters support Trump, as compared to 54% who support Harris. While the former president still has a ways to go to reach Harris’ numbers with this key demographic, this poll shows he’s come a long way from his meager 19% and 27% Latino support in 2016 and 2020, respectively.

With this in mind, we predict that although Kamala Harris will win the state of New Mexico, it will be by a significantly slimmer margin than four years ago. If Trump can come even close to performing at 40% with Latino voters, who make up almost half of New Mexico’s population, then he can certainly boost his performance to upwards of 45%.

UTAH

Once called Deseret, the land of present-day Utah was first settled by famed Mormon pioneer and University namesake Brigham Young in 1847; this unique history gives the state demographics unlike any other in the nation. For starters, Utah is the only state to have a majority of its residents belong to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints; over 60% of Utahns are Mormon, with Idaho coming in a distant second at 26%. Since a majority of the Utah electorate is Mormon, who are generally extremely socially conservative, this makes the state reliably vote for Republicans.

There’s no better example of this than in the Presidential Election of 2012, when Republican Mitt Romney, the first Mormon to be a major party Presidential Candidate, won an astounding 72.8% of the vote. After losing that election, Romney ran and won Utah’s 2018 Senate election; he is retiring once his term ends in the beginning of 2025. Besides Romney, another famous name in Utah politics is former CIA officer Evan McMullin. Best known for his third-party presidential run in 2016, McMullin was able to win 21.5% of the vote in his home state of Utah, an impressive feat, but still finishing third to Trump and Clinton, who received 45.5% and 27.5% of the vote, respectively. In this election, Utah was by far the state with the highest percentage of the vote going to third-party candidates, at 27%.

But in 2020, without any viable third-parties, Trump was able to win over a majority of Utah voters, getting 58.1% of the vote to Biden’s 37.7%. And although both parties improved on their 2016 numbers, Biden’s performance was the strongest by a Democrat in the state since LBJ in 1964. So, will Kamala Harris expand on Biden’s impressive gains in Utah this November? Unfortunately for Democrats, the answer is probably not. Biden’s 2020 performance in the Beehive State is likely an outlier, and the 2022 midterm elections back this up.

In Utah’s four House races, GOP candidates received 63.1% of the vote, while their Democrat opponents only got 32.2%. This was a respectable improvement for the Republicans, who only received 61% of Utahns' votes two years earlier. And although in the 2022 Senate election, incumbent Republican Mike Lee beat our old friend Evan McMullin by just 10.4 points, the closest Senate election in Utah since 1974, this tight race says more about McMullin’s strength with Utah voters than any GOP weakness in the state. Furthermore, Utah has the third lowest black population per capita in the nation, spelling big trouble for Harris. She is highly unlikely to appeal to Utah’s majority white, majority Mormon voter base as well as Biden did back in 2020.

Therefore, we predict that Donald Trump will win Utah by a significantly greater margin than he did four years ago. Trump won’t do close to as well as Romney did in 2012, but expect his numbers to be in-line with John McCain’s 62.6% of the vote way back in 2008.

Indiana, the home of Mike Pence and Dan Quayle, will get its chance this November to elect another single-term vice president to the chief executive. But will Donald Trump’s falling out with Vice President Pence hurt his chances in the Hoosier State, or will he still glide to victory even without the former governor’s support?

In the past two election cycles, Trump has been dominant in Indiana. In 2020, while his support crumbled in most sun and rust belt states, Trump quietly (but nonetheless impressively) pulled in 172,000 more votes in Indiana than four years prior. Percentagewise, he gained 1/5th of a point, from 56.8% to 57%, in a year where he lost ground in all but seven states. With Harris’ association with the unpopularity of the Biden Administration, former president Trump certainly can grow his margin of victory in the state.

Indiana’s 2022 Senate race, where incumbent Republican Todd Young took on Democratic challenger Thomas McDermott, indicates Trump may be able to outperform both his 2016 and 2020 victories in the Midwestern state. Young received 58.7% of the vote, compared to McDermott’s meager 37.9%. This represented a massive gain from Young’s first Senate election back in 2016, where he barely cracked 50% of the vote, showing that Republican support in Indiana remains as strong as ever.

So, will The Donald be able to put up 58% or more of the vote? Not necessarily. It isn’t all rosy for the GOP; the battle over abortion threatens to dash Trump’s chances of any gains in the state. In 2023, Indiana initiated a near-total ban on abortions, which took effect this past August after being injuncted for a year. Trump’s weakness and Harris’ strength on this hot-button issue will likely lead more Hoosier women to vote blue this fall. Democrats already win 43% of Indiana women, beating out the Republicans’ 39%, and with the abortion issue alienating this already smaller Republican voter base, it seems unlikely that men will turn out for Trump enough to net him any gains in the state.

We predict Trump will carry Indiana by a slightly smaller margin than in 2020. Don’t expect a collapse (Trump will win Indiana by a considerable amount), but also don’t expect any sizable gains for the former president in this state.

MINNESOTA

Having voted blue in the last 12 consecutive elections, the longest streak of any state in the nation, Minnesota has always been just shy of tipping to the Republicans. In 1984, when Incumbent Republican Ronald Reagan won 49 states against former Democratic vice president Walter Mondale, he lost Minnesota, Mondale’s home state, by just 3,761 votes. And again, in 2016, Republican Donald Trump barely lost the state to Democrat Hillary Clinton, 46.4% to 44.9%, making Minnesota the blue wall state that got away from Trump that election.

But it’s doubtful that the former President will finally be able to conquer the Land of 10,000 Lakes this November, as their Governor Tim Walz is on the Democrat ticket as Kamala Harris’ running mate. Interestingly, if victorious, he’ll be the third Minnesotan to become a Democrat VP in the last 60 years, joining Hubert Humphrey and Walter Mondale in this club. Walz was a surprise choice for Harris, beating out more nationally known Democrats like Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro and Arizona Senator and former NASA astronaut Mark Kelly. But his selection did have a clear motive: appeal to working-class Midwestern voters, especially in the crucial swing states of Wisconsin and Michigan; it’s unclear whether this strategy has had success yet.

Walz’s favorability rating in his home state is nothing to write home about. In a recent poll of likely voters by the Minnesota Star Tribune, just 48% of Minnesotans had a favorable opinion of the Governor, while 47% had an unfavorable opinion of him. Although these numbers aren’t great, Walz certainly lives up to the “do no harm” mantra of Vice-Presidential candidates better than Republican VP pick JD Vance, who had a 42% favorable and 48% unfavorable rating in the same poll. So, although Walz is unlikely to harm Harris’ campaign, he is unlikely to move the needle much either.

After Trump’s admirable 2016 performance in Minnesota, his 2020 showing was far less praiseworthy. The Incumbent Republican received just 45.3% of the vote to Democrat Joe Biden’s 52.4%, losing by a 7.1-point margin. Despite this, the GOP performed similarly in Minnesota’s 8 House Elections in 2020 to how they did in 2016, having their share of the total vote decrease by just 0.5 points from 46.73% to 46.18%. And in the 2022 midterms, Republicans came within striking distance of a majority, receiving 48.1% of the vote to the Democrats’ 50.1%.

We believe Trump is unlikely to match the GOP’s 2022 performance; polling has consistently placed him 5 to 8 points behind Harris in Minnesota. And while we don’t think he will lose by greater than 7 points, which is what he lost to Biden by four years ago, we also don’t believe this former President is in contention in the state this election cycle. Therefore, we predict that Kamala Harris will carry Minnesota by a margin of 4 to 5 points.

ILLINOIS

Illinois, the 6th most populous state in the country, is dominated by the politics of its largest city, Chicago; and residents of the Windy City are, unsurprisingly, quite liberal. Joe Biden won Illinois by a 17-point margin back in 2020, almost identical to Hillary Clinton’s margin of victory four years prior. And in a state with 17 house seats, Republicans only control three of them. So, it’s not hard to guess whether Kamala Harris or Donald Trump will win Illinois this November. But the margin of victory that Harris beats Trump by might be closer than you think.

For one thing, Illinois is not the liberal bastion many believe it to be. If you ignore Chicago, the state’s politics closely resemble its rust belt neighbor Indiana. Looking at Illinois’ 2020 election results by county, you’ll see a sea of red with a spot of blue in its top-right corner, where Chicago and its suburbs are. To improve his numbers in the Land of Lincoln, Donald Trump must overperform in this sea of red. One indicator of Republican strength in Illinois’ rural regions are the 2022 midterm election results. In the state’s house races, GOP candidates received 43.7% of the vote to the Democrats’ 56%, the best Republican performance since 2016.

Additionally, in Illinois’ 2022 senate race, Democrat Tammy Duckworth was reelected with 56.8% of the vote, her Republican opponent Kathy Salvi receiving 41.5%. And while Duckworth performed in line with her first run for senate in 2016, the GOP performed significantly better in the state’s rural areas than six years prior, a good sign for Trump. Therefore, we predict that although Kamala Harris will win Illinois by upwards of 10 points, the unpopularity of the current administration will likely weaken Harris’ appeal with voters outside Chicago, and Harris will perform worse than Biden in 2020 as a result.

And while Harris, who would be the first Black woman president if elected, may perform stronger with Chicago’s urban Black population, Trump’s gains with suburban and rural voters are more than likely to offset this.

OHIO

Perhaps no state encapsulates the changing dynamics of the Midwest – and blue-collar America as a whole – better than Ohio.

Long known for its status as a bellwether state, Ohio had been a critical battleground for nearly the entire 20th century. It remained this way through the 2000’s, when the Buckeye State played a pivotal role in delivering victories for both Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012.

Since then, however, Ohio has undergone a hard shift to the right. Trump’s 2016 and 2020 victories, where he won the state by slightly less than 10%, are commonly cited as major turning points. In reality, though, Ohio Democrats’ fortunes had begun declining years earlier: in 2010, for instance, Republicans won landslide victories on the federal, state, and local levels.

Ohio’s sharp, consistent rightward shift mirrors the changing dynamics in the Midwest as a whole. However, Ohio's political landscape is more nuanced than this single partisan trend might suggest – with an especially sharp divide between its urban, suburban, and rural areas.

The state’s largest urban centers — Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati — are strongholds for the Democratic Party. These cities and their surrounding suburbs are home to more diverse and younger populations, both of whom form the core of the modern Democratic coalition. Especially significant is Ohio’s significant Black population, particularly in Cleveland and other northern industrial cities. These communities remain strongly Democratic, driven by concerns over racial justice, economic inequality, and health care. 

The three cities’ growth patterns have differed wildly. While Cincinnati’s population is relatively stagnant, and Cleveland’s been in decline for the better part of a century, Columbus is one of the fastest-growing cities in the nation. Its growing and diverse population has solidified its role as a Democratic anchor in the state. 

On the surface, it might not seem clear why Ohio is significantly more conservative than other Midwestern and demographically-similar states, such as Wisconsin and Michigan.

While Ohio has cities comparable in size and politics to those in Wisconsin and Michigan, the areas outside of urban Ohio are much, much more conservative compared to their counterparts in the other states.

Ohio suburbs have long been reliable Republican strongholds, but where suburbs across America have shifted to the left during the Trump era, Ohio’s have remained defiantly conservative. This disparity can be traced to a few key demographics: educational attainment, racial diversity, and religiosity. Yes, the suburbs around areas like Cincinnati, which skew highly-educated and higher-income, have demonstrated a noticeable leftward trend. However, from a big-picture perspective, the vast majority of suburban Ohio hasn’t budged significantly.

Adding to an already-gloomy picture for Democrats: rural Ohio, which stretches across the state’s southern and western regions, votes near-universally Republican and is (seemingly) trending further in this direction. Voters in these areas, many of whom are white and work in manufacturing, agriculture, and energy, have resonated with Trump’s populist rhetoric.. The state's white, working-class voters, especially in Appalachia – a once-Democratic, heavily coal-reliant region which has bolted rightward due to the party’s increasing support of clean energy and social progressivism – have become a bedrock of the Republican coalition.

Despite Ohio’s Republican lean, the national debate over issues like reproductive rights and labor protections has significantly impacted state dynamics. The overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022 has energized large groups of voters, particularly suburban women and young voters, as seen in the landslide rejection of Issue 1 – a measure which would have allowed state Republicans to overturn abortion rights. 

Despite fluctuating social dynamics, Ohio remains a clearly Republican state – and this is unlikely to change in the coming decades, as rural Ohio continues its trek rightward while suburban and urban Ohio remain mostly stagnant. We predict Trump will win Ohio by roughly 10%. This slight Republican overperformance relative to 2020 and 2016 is a function of Kamala Harris’ seeming difficulties in connecting with working class white voters. 

The home of the Adams, Bush, and Kennedy families, Massachusetts holds an important place in our nation’s history. The birthplace of the American Revolution has been a solidly blue state for decades; in fact, if you ignore elections with Ronald Reagan or Dwight Eisenhower, Massachusetts has voted Democrat in every presidential election since 1928. Bay Staters’ commitment to the Democratic Party is shown no better than in 2012, when they overwhelmingly voted for Democrat Barack Obama over their own former governor Republican Mitt Romney (60.7% to 37.5%).

In 2020, Democratic support in Massachusetts increased to a staggering 65.6% of votes for Joe Biden compared to only 32.1% for President Donald Trump. This was the best performance by a Democrat in the state since LBJ in 1964. But it’s not all sunny for Democrats... In 2022, Republicans had their best midterm election performance in the state since 2010, and this fall Elizabeth Warren faces a worthy GOP challenger for her Senate seat in Marine Corps veteran John Deaton.

And with Vice President Kamala Harris being weighed down by the unpopularity of the Biden administration, Former President Trump shouldn’t have a hard time improving his numbers this time around. For these reasons, we predict that although Harris will have a significant victory in Massachusetts this November, Donald Trump will be able to ride Republican momentum in the Bay State to net himself sizable gains from his 2020 run.

CONNECTICUT

Connecticut, the birth state of George W. Bush, today shares the liberal politics of its neighbors to the North, East, and West. But once upon a time, Connecticut was one of the most solid red states in the nation. In fact, in the election of 1932, where Republican Herbert Hoover ran for reelection against FDR, Connecticut was one of only six states to vote for the unpopular incumbent. And up until 1992, Connecticut was a likely Republican state, but since then, they’ve turned blue and never looked back.

In 2020, 59.2% of Connecticutians voted for Joe Biden, while only 39.2% voted for Donald Trump. This was a major improvement for Democrats from the 2016 Presidential election, where Hillary Clinton only got 54.6% of the vote, compared to Donald Trump’s respectable 40.9%. Despite this, the GOP has actually made gains in the last three House elections in Connecticut. In the state’s 2018 House elections, the GOP received 37.78% of the vote; in 2020, they received 38.52%, and in 2022, they received 41.73%.

With these recent improvements for Republicans in Connecticut, will Donald Trump be able to perform better this time around in the Nutmeg State? In Connecticut’s 2022 Senate race, where incumbent Democrat Richard Blumenthal went up against Republican challenger Leora Levy, Blumenthal was reelected with 57.45% of the vote. This performance was significantly worse than during his 2016 run, where he received 63.2% of the vote. The county results from the two elections show that while all eight of Connecticut’s counties went blue in the 2016 Senate race, two counties, Litchfield and Windham, actually flipped red in the 2022 race.

And while in 2020, Donald Trump barely won Litchfield and Windham counties with 51.7% and 51.1% of the votes, respectively, Levy won these counties with 54% and 52.8%, a decent improvement. Unfortunately for Democrats, in his 2022 race, Blumenthal performed worse in every single Connecticut county than Joe Biden did in 2020. Overall, it’s very unlikely that Kamala Harris will be able to live up to Joe Biden’s spectacular performance in the Nutmeg State four years ago. Republicans are winning voters in this state back, especially in the rural regions of Northeastern and Northwestern Connecticut.

As a result of this, we predict that Kamala Harris will win the state by numbers more in line with Hillary Clinton’s back in 2016. Furthermore, we expect Trump to crack the 40% mark and make big gains in Litchfield and Windham counties.

MAINE

The most northern of the lower 48 states, Maine is the largest and youngest member of New England, only gaining statehood in 1821 after seceding from Massachusetts. Politically, Maine has been a relatively blue state for decades. A Republican hasn’t won the popular vote in Vacationland since George Bush in 1988, and only four years later in 1992, Bush embarrassingly finished third in the state behind both Democrat Bill Clinton and Independent Ross Perot, losing to the Texas businessman by just 316 votes.

Despite the GOP’s inability to win the statewide vote in Maine, Donald Trump became the first presidential candidate to capitalize on a 1972 law that divided the state’s four electoral votes between the winner of its two congressional districts as well as the statewide winner. In 2016, Trump earned one electoral vote by winning Maine’s 2nd district with 51.3% of the vote, while narrowly finishing runner-up statewide to Hillary Clinton, 47.8% to 44.9%. This flip of the state’s northern, mostly rural district is truly a testament to Trump’s dominance with this group of voters; only four years prior, Republican Mitt Romney lost this district by 8.56 points to Barack Obama.

In 2020, despite Trump performing significantly worse in the state, winning 44% of the vote to Joe Biden’s 53.1%, the incumbent Republican retained the 2nd district with 52.26% of the vote. While polling is sparse this election cycle in the key district, Trump will likely preserve his victory this November. In the 2022 midterm elections, the GOP performed in line with their 2020 results, receiving 41.9% of statewide House votes to the Democrats’ 58%. In the 2nd District, Democrat Jared Golden was reelected with 53.1% of the vote against Republican Bruce Poliquin, who received 46.9%. Two years prior, in 2020, Golden received 53% of the vote, while his Republican opponent got 46.9% (nearly identical margins).

It’s important to note that many residents of the 2nd district split their votes for Trump at the top and Democrats down-ballot, which is why both the Republican President and Democrat Golden won a majority of votes in the same election. With this in mind, we expect Mainers to split their votes once again, with Golden and Trump both getting slight majorities in the 2nd district, netting the former President an electoral vote. In the battle for Maine’s remaining three electoral votes, Democrat Kamala Harris will easily win the 1st district. We predict she’ll also win the statewide vote by roughly the same margin Joe Biden did in 2020.

VERMONT

Vermont, the liberal bastion where in 2020 Joe Biden got an eye-watering 66.1% of the vote, the home of America’s only socialist senator, is also a state with an extremely popular Republican governor. Yes, it’s often forgotten that while Joe Biden was out getting a higher margin of victory in Vermont than any other state (35 points above Donald Trump), popular Republican Governor Phil Scott was cruising to his second reelection win with 68.5% of the vote (over 40 points above his Democratic challenger).

So how can America’s most liberal state so resoundingly vote a Republican to its highest office? And does this victory give hope for Donald Trump in the Green Mountain State this November? Just to make it clear: Donald Trump will not win Vermont; he’s about as likely to win here as Joe Biden is in West Virginia. Phil Scott’s victories in Vermont are an anomaly, the result of the governor’s fiscally conservative but socially liberal policies. In fact, Governor Scott supported both of Trump’s impeachments and even voted for Joe Biden in 2020, making him a RINO for some on the far-right.

We predict Harris will likely perform slightly worse in Vermont than Biden did four years ago. Although Trump has done nothing since the last election to make himself more popular in the state, since RFK Jr. is on the ballot in Vermont, it’s probable that he’ll siphon a small percentage of votes away from Harris, enough to make winning over more than 66.1% of Vermonters doubtful.

RHODE ISLAND

Rhode Island is certainly Biden country. In 2020, it was one of only three states to have all its counties go blue. Sure, that may be because it only has five of them (none more than 30 miles from its largest city, Providence), but it’s impressive nonetheless. America’s smallest state has voted blue in every election since 1988, and in 2024 it’s poised to stay that way.

Four years ago, Joe Biden won 59.4% of Rhode Island’s vote compared to Donald Trump’s 38.6%. In 2016, Clinton won the state by a narrower margin, getting 55.4%, while Trump performed similarly to 2020 with 39.8%. Trump actually won Rhode Island’s Kent County, right in the center of the state, by 600 votes in 2016; he lost this same county by over 7,000 votes (53% to 45%) in 2020.

This election cycle, Kamala Harris may face problems trying to match President Biden’s performance. In the 2022 midterm election, Democrat Seth Magaziner barely defeated Republican Allan Fung to earn Rhode Island’s 2nd House seat, which is the entirety of Western Rhode Island and half of Providence. Magaziner finished with 50.5% of the vote and Fung came runner-up with a very respectable 46.8%.

If Donald Trump can reach anywhere close to this performance in the 2nd district, which includes the entirety of Kent County (which he won back in 2016), then he can definitely eat into Harris’ margin of victory. Rhode Island isn’t just suburbs; in rural parts of the state, Harris’ appeal isn’t going to be as strong as Biden’s was in 2020, and these voters are likely going to turn out for Donald Trump in greater numbers than they did four years ago.

Therefore, we predict that while Rhode Island will go solid blue this fall, it will not reach the 59.4% threshold set by President Biden the last time around.

NEW HAMPSHIRE

The black sheep of New England, or more aptly red sheep, New Hampshire certainly has a more conservative streak than its neighbors. The Granite State has voted for Republican presidential candidates in 5 of the last 12 elections, although in none since 2004. Moreover, the margin of victory for both parties has been within 10 points in the last eight elections, making New Hampshire a consistently purple (or light blue) state. Most recently, in 2020, Democrat Joe Biden defeated Republican Incumbent Donald Trump in the state with 52.7% of the vote, to Trump’s 45.4%. This was a far cry from Trump’s 2016 run (where he lost the state to Hillary Clinton by just 2,736 votes) and was the worst Republican performance in New Hampshire since John McCain’s all the way back in 2008.

Yet, for a brief moment after Joe Biden’s disastrous June debate, Trump led in polls from the state, begging the question: does the former President have a chance to flip New Hampshire red this fall? Things appeared bright at the start of July for Republicans: Trump was leading Biden by 3.1 points nationally, and states like Virginia, Minnesota, and, of course, New Hampshire were suddenly in play. However, Trump’s lead evaporated as quickly as it appeared when Joe Biden was replaced with Vice President Kamala Harris. Since Harris was tapped, she has reversed Trump’s lead and is now ahead by 6.4 points as per Project 538’s polling average.

But there are more factors than just polls to consider in the White Mountain state this election cycle. As popular Republican Governor Chris Sununu declines to seek a fifth two-year term, GOP candidate Kelly Ayotte, who represented New Hampshire for one term in the Senate from 2011 to 2017, is in a tense race to take his place. Running against Democrat Joyce Craig, the former mayor of the state’s largest city, Manchester, Ayotte has taken a small lead in recent polls, with the RealClearPolitics average placing her up a single point on Craig. So, if the Republican is able to fend off Craig and win the governorship, she may be able to give Donald Trump a boost in his own race against Kamala Harris.

But at the end of the day, Trump’s lead in New Hampshire was likely just a blip on the map. And while we believe the former President will perform better than in 2020, when he lost the state by 7.4 points, we don’t anticipate him coming within five percent of Harris. Therefore, we predict Kamala Harris will win New Hampshire roughly in line with the polling, by 5-6 percentage points.

The double landlocked state home to the Kansas City Chiefs, St. Louis Cardinals, the mighty Mississippi River, and Senator Josh Hawley (plus his fist), Missouri has a storied history as our nation’s Gateway to the West. In recent years, the Show Me State has voted reliably Republican, but throughout the 90s and 2000s it was a hotly contested swing state, there being no better example of this than in 2008, when Republican Presidential Candidate John McCain just barely won the state, beating out Democrat Barack Obama 49.4% to 49.3%.

In the last 16 years, however, Missouri has shifted significantly towards the right. In 2020, Donald Trump won the state with 56.8% of the vote, an identical percentage to his 2016 run and three points higher than Mitt Romney did in 2012. And on a statewide level, Missouri has a Republican Governor and Legislature, as well as two Republican Senators and six Republican House Members. So, does this seemingly solid red state have any chance to fall to Democrat Kamala Harris this November?

Trump’s extremely strong support from rural voters has been his key to success, and in Missouri, this has been no different. A majority of residents voted for Democrat Joe Biden in just three of Missouri’s 114 counties; Trump won everywhere but Jackson County (Kansas City), Boone County (Columbia), and St. Louis County.

And in the 2022 midterms, the GOP showed off their strength with voters outside Missouri’s urban centers. In the 6th congressional district, which represents the rural upper third of the state, Republican House Member Sam Graves cruised to reelection against Democratic challenger Henry Martin with 70.3% of the vote, 3.2 points higher than his 2020 run. In this last election, Republicans even garnered greater support in Missouri’s 1st congressional district (the city of St. Louis and its suburbs), with Republican Andrew Jones finishing a distant second to Democrat Incumbent Cori Bush, but nevertheless receiving 24.3% of the vote, 5.3 points higher than the GOP candidate two years prior.

Even though Republicans may be performing better in this Midwestern state, Trump’s potential victory is complicated by the issue of abortion. After the overturning of Roe v. Wade back in 2022, Missouri was the first state in the country to ban the practice. And although this ban occurred prior to the 2022 midterm elections, which the GOP still made significant improvements in, this November things are different; an abortion referendum is on the ballot in the state of Missouri. This prospective amendment to the state’s constitution protecting the right to an abortion is likely to propel reluctant voters, especially women, to the polls, who will almost certainly vote blue.

And considering a referendum in the similarly right-leaning state of Kentucky failed to outlaw abortion in its constitution, being voted down 52.4% to 47.7%, it’s a definite possibility that voters in Missouri will choose to protect the right to an abortion in their own constitution.

Based on all these factors, we predict that Donald Trump will win Missouri by a slightly greater margin than in 2020. Although this abortion referendum may hurt his chances for big gains in the state, GOP support from rural voters will likely offset this and still boost his numbers in the state.

IOWA

Perhaps the most consistently inconsistent state, Iowa has voted for the Democrat Presidential Candidate in 6 of the last 12 elections and for the Republican in the other 6. Most recently in 2020, Iowans voted for Republican Donald Trump over Democrat Joe Biden, 53.1% to 44.9%. But while Iowa is a moderately Republican-leaning state today, just 12 years ago it was a relatively Democrat-leaning state.

Comparing Iowa’s 2012 Presidential elections results, when the state went blue for Barack Obama, to its neighbors of Wisconsin and Minnesota (two other quintessential Midwestern swing states), we see that all three of them voted for Obama by within a percent, Iowa with 52%, Wisconsin with 52.8%, and Minnesota with 52.7%. But just four years later when Democrat Hillary Clinton ran against Republican Donald Trump, she received just 41.7%, 46.5%, and 46.4% of the vote in Iowa, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, respectively. And while Clinton did end up winning Minnesota by 1.52 points, she barely lost Wisconsin by just 0.77 points and was absolutely blown out in Iowa by 9.41 points.

Donald Trump’s substantial 2016 victory in Iowa raises the question: Why has the state shifted so far to the right in the last decade? Iowa’s shift towards the Republican party was not actually as abrupt as you may have expected. In fact, in all four of the most recent presidential elections, Republicans increased their share of Iowa’s vote every time, going from 44.4% in 2008 to 53.1% in 2020. But the most significant increase did occur in 2016, when Donald Trump jumped 5 points from Mitt Romney’s performance four years prior.

There is a clear trend in this shift: Iowa’s urban centers became slightly more liberal, while its rural areas became significantly more conservative. And while during this time period states with extremely urban populations, like California and Massachusetts, had a statewide shift towards the left, since Iowa is one of the most rural states in the nation, they unsurprisingly moved in the opposite direction; this is confirmed by a look at Iowa’s county results. Polk County, the most populated in the state and home to the capital Des Moines, went 56.4% for Obama in 2012 and 56.7% for Biden in 2020, a Democrat gain of 0.3 points. On the other hand, Adams County, the least populated in the state, went 51.1% for Romney in 2012 and an astounding 71% for Trump in 2020, a Republican gain of 19.9 points. And while Adams County has less than 1% of Polk County’s population, only 6 of Iowa’s 99 counties went blue in 2020; the remaining 93 red counties more than made up for their smaller populations by sheer strength in numbers.

Now that Iowa is no longer considered a swing state, there is an absence of polling in the state, making it hard to predict whether Democrat Kamala Harris will be able to gain ground for the Democrats this election. However, based on Trump’s consistently growing support with rural Iowans, we predict that the former President will carry the state by a slightly greater margin than he did four years prior.

KANSAS

Located at the center of the contiguous United States, in the heart of the Great Plains, Kansas is probably best known as Dorothy’s home in The Wizard of Oz, but there’s much more to the state than a classic movie. Kansas entered the Union as the 34th state, two months before the outbreak of the Civil War. During its years as a territory, from 1854-1859, the region was rocked by skirmishes between pro- and anti-slavery settlers, a conflict known as Bleeding Kansas. And while Kansas did become a free state, this conflict significantly increased tensions between Northern and Southern states and was a precursor to the Civil War.

Today, Kansans are relatively conservative on average; although they elected a Democrat governor in 2018, they’ve voted for the Republican candidate for President in every election since 1940, discounting LBJ’s landslide 1964 victory. In 2020, Donald Trump carried Kansas with 56.1% of the vote to Joe Biden’s 41.5%, a margin of 14.6 points. And although this substantial margin places the state into the reliably Republican category, it was significantly smaller than back in 2016, when Trump won Kansas by 20.6 points.

So, how can we explain this massive margin decrease in the state? And will Kamala Harris have a shot at closing this gap even further, winning Kansas this November? Joe Biden’s exemplary performance in the Sunflower State came down to a single region: Johnson County. A part of the Kansas City metro, Johnson County is largely suburban, and in recent years, Donald Trump has struggled to attract this group of voters.

Comparing the results of the 2016 and 2020 elections in Johnson, which is the most populated county in the state, we see a significant decline for Trump; he narrowly won the area in 2016 by 2.7 points but lost it to Biden four years later by a sizable margin of 8.3 points. To put it simply, Harris’ path to victory runs right through this county.

While it’s unlikely that Trump can win these suburban areas at the rate he did eight years ago, the 2022 midterm elections do show some signs of hope for Republicans. Although GOP House candidates performed flat, receiving 56.9% of the vote (a quarter point lower than in 2020), in Kansas’ Senate election, Republican incumbent Jerry Moran easily won reelection with 60% of the vote. And in the extremely important Johnson County, he won a respectable 48% of the vote, but still lost to his Democratic challenger Mark Holland by 1.3 points.

So, despite Kansas certainly shifting closer to the center, Moran’s victory shows there’s still some Republican might in the state. We predict that Donald Trump will win Kansas by a greater margin than in 2020. Biden’s amazing performance in the state four years ago is unlikely to be replicated by Kamala Harris this time around. If the former President is able to even come close to matching Senator Moran’s 1.3-point deficit in Johnson County back in 2022, he can expect big gains.

America’s largest and most sparsely populated state, Alaska, is truly our nation’s last frontier, being over 2,000 miles away from its closest American neighbor, Washington state. This isolation from the rest of the contiguous United States has given Alaska a certain independence. The state has the highest percentage of registered Libertarians in the nation, and in 2016, the party’s Presidential candidate Gary Johnson won an admirable 5.9% of the vote; Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton won 52.9% and 37.7%, respectively. Additionally, in that year’s senate race, Incumbent Republican Lisa Murkowski fended off Libertarian challenger Joe Miller, receiving 44.4% of the vote to Miller’s impressive 29.2%.

But with the dropout of Robert Kennedy Jr. and his endorsement of Donald Trump, there is no longer a notable third-party presidential candidate this election cycle. Although Kennedy remains on the ballot in 33 states, including Alaska, he is unlikely to garner many votes, leaving it to be a two-way race between Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Kamala Harris.

In 2020, Donald Trump defeated Joe Biden in Alaska, receiving 52.8% of the vote to Biden’s 42.8%. This 10-point margin, the closest in the state since 1992, is likely tighter than you expected. Alaska is certainly not as conservative as other sparsely populated mountain-west states like Idaho and Wyoming, and this was shown no better than in the 2022 midterm election.

Being home to only 733,000 residents, Alaska has one at-large house district, and from 1972 to his death in 2022, this district was represented by Republican Don Young. After the 25-term congressman’s death, a special election was held that August to fill his seat. The polarizing former Republican Governor and 2008 vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin ran against Democrat Mary Peltola and fellow Republican Nick Begich. Alaska’s recently passed ranked-choice voting method resulted in Palin, Peltola, and Begich receiving 30.9%, 39.7%, and 27.8% of the first-round vote, respectively, and Peltola narrowly defeating Palin in the second round, 51.5% to 48.5%.

Undeterred, Palin challenged Peltola again that November as the Democrat tried to seek her first full term. Stunningly, Palin finished significantly worse than she did that summer, receiving just 45% of the vote to Peltola’s 55%. Although this embarrassing Republican loss likely won’t affect Trump’s performance in Alaska this November, it does signal that a historically red state is shifting closer toward the center.

An important issue to Alaskan voters is energy, and Trump likely has an edge over Harris in this department. The oil and gas industries are the largest component of the state’s economy, and each year these revenues finance the Alaska Permanent Fund, which pays out $1,600 to every resident. However, this once-booming energy industry has been in decline in recent years. Alaska has fallen from the second to the sixth highest state in oil production and from the third highest in household income in 2010 to the twelfth highest today.

Trump’s recent campaign pledge to restart oil drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which was halted by the Biden administration in 2023, is likely to resonate with Alaskans who greatly depend upon this industry. We predict that Donald Trump will win Alaska by a slightly greater margin than in 2020. Although Mary Peltola has shown Democratic performance in the state is certainly on the rise, Trump’s strength on energy policy is likely to compensate for this and more.

OREGON

Oregon is seen today as an extremely progressive state, thanks mostly to the politics of its biggest city, Portland. But not long ago, the Beaver State was a consistent swing state; back in 2000, Democrat Al Gore carried the state by just 0.5 points, and even in 2016, Hillary Clinton barely received a majority of Oregonian votes. Although in recent years the state has been shifting to the left politically, Oregon still has a vocal conservative population.

Will Donald Trump be able to rally Oregon Republicans this fall and gain significant ground in the state?

In 2022, the GOP had their strongest performance in Oregon House elections since 2010, with Republican candidates receiving 44.7% of the vote to the Democrats' 53.1%. A key indicator of growing conservative support in the state is Oregon’s 2nd congressional district, which covers the eastern two-thirds of the state. In that district, Republican Cliff Bentz won reelection with an impressive 67.5% of the vote, up from 59.9% two years prior. Donald Trump won this district in 2020 with just 55% of the vote, signaling that it has shifted further to the right since his last presidential run.

Oregon’s 2nd district is also noteworthy as it encompasses the counties currently supporting the Greater Idaho Movement, a conservative effort seeking to have eastern Oregon secede from the state and join Idaho. Since its inception in 2020, the movement has gained considerable traction among residents who feel that the liberal politics of western Oregon overshadow the conservative majority in rural areas. Currently, 13 Oregon counties have approved ballot measures in favor of Greater Idaho, and legislation is pending in both state legislatures. While it remains unlikely that this movement will succeed, it demonstrates that conservatives in Oregon, despite being a minority statewide, are making their voices heard.

Given the strong Republican performance during the 2022 midterms and the rise of the Greater Idaho Movement, we predict that Donald Trump will perform better in Oregon than he did in 2020. While he received 40.4% of the vote to Joe Biden’s 56.5%, we believe he could receive upwards of 43% of the vote this November against Kamala Harris.

WASHINGTON

Washington State may be Democrats’ most optimism-inducing state in the nation. While today, Washington is not as Democratic-leaning as California or New York, it holds the key distinction of trending blue where the other states have remained stagnant or even began shifting right.

Known for its strong liberal leanings, Washington has been a Democratic stronghold in presidential elections for decades. Since 1988, the state has consistently voted for the Democratic candidate, with Joe Biden securing over 58% of the vote in 2020. Biden’s performance represents a significant leftward shift from his preceding 21st-century nominees: Al Gore and John Kerry won the Evergreen State by less than 10 points, while Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton carried the state by low-to-mid double digits.

Washington State’s geographic and political landscape is divided in two halves, along west and east. The west side contains the majority of its population, who mostly reside in densely populated suburbs and urban centers surrounding Seattle. The eastern side of Washington, primarily composed of white, older voters who reside in sparsely-populated rural areas, more closely resembles conservative states such as Idaho and Wyoming.

While Seattle and the surrounding Puget Sound region dominate the state’s population and deliver substantial margins for Democrats, eastern Washington tends to lean Republican, with a focus on issues like agriculture, gun rights, and limited government.

Despite being nearly 80% white, Washington’s electorate is one of the more diverse in the Pacific Northwest. Its growing Hispanic population, combined with significant Asian American and Black communities around the Seattle Metro, have helped solidify Democratic dominance in the state. And although the state’s white voters – many of whom work in industries like farming, forestry, and manufacturing – remain strong supporters of the Republican Party, they still tend to vote less universally Republican than their counterparts in the South or the Mountain West.

National debate over social issues like reproductive and LGBTQ+ rights are unlikely to cause a rightward shift in Washington’s highly-educated, mostly secular electorate. The state’s Democratic coalition, like most others’, is split between a more-moderate suburban faction and a more left-leaning, younger faction residing in urban areas. But these intra-party divisions are much less pronounced, and have caused far less negative consequences for the party as a whole, in Washington than in states like New York, California, and even neighboring Oregon.

At the presidential level, we expect Washington to remain firmly in the Democratic column. While Republicans have nominated a strong candidate for the concurrent gubernatorial race in former WA-08 Rep. Bob Reichert, it is unlikely to compensate for the presence of Trump at the top of the ballot, whose divisive rhetoric and social conservatism have been firmly rejected by Washington’s voters. We predict that Kamala Harris will win Washington by a similar margin to Biden’s: around 20%.

MICHIGAN

I'm only categorizing one Democratic Senate seat as leans Democratic for the time being, and that state is Michigan, with incumbent Democrat Gary Peters being up for reelection. 

Now, as I mentioned earlier, Peters had a rather disappointing showing in 2020, winning against Republican John James by less than two points, to the point where the election could not be decided on Election night; it was a few days before it could really be determined with sufficient accuracy. 

Now, this was a far cry from his showing in 2014, when Peters won the seat in a landslide with nearly 14-point margins. 

Looking forward to 2026, although Peters hasn't declared whether he is running for reelection, it seems that Democrats have a good chance of winning. Michigan, out of the three Rust Belt swing states, being Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, was the bluest of all three. 

As of now, I would predict there to be two toss-up races, both of which are in states with currently Democratic senators. 

The first of which is Michigan, where Gary Peters won his second term in 2020 by a rather disappointing margin. He won against John James by less than two points, while Joe Biden was winning the state by nearly three. 

This was a far cry from Peters’ 2014 showing, where he weathered the Republican wave and won the seat by 14 points against a past Republican Secretary of State. 

So, judging by this, it would seem that Gary Peters is destined for a loss in 2026, considering he declined so heavily from 2014 to 2020. 

But I'd argue it isn't as simple as this. 

Gary Peters seems to be above water, at least, and fairly popular in Michigan. He's not extremely far left; he's a conventional liberal Democrat who doesn't have too much of a national profile but is instead more focused on the procedural side of things in the Senate chamber, among others. 

And I'd argue that that 1.5% win was more of a fluke, in that maybe Peters didn't campaign as vigorously as he should, or he got a little too comfortable thinking that, "Oh, Michigan is looking like a very strong Biden state. Oh, I won so heavily in 2014," that he didn't really give enough attention to the election as was needed. 

Obviously, Peters, or one of his wiser campaign advisers, will realize that it is necessary to give your full attention to a race in Michigan, which is one of the most competitive states in the nation. 

And therefore, I think Gary Peters isn't immediately out. In fact, I think he has a roughly equal chance of winning reelection. 

Now, I think I, and other forecasters, will have a better sense of the state of this election once we learn how Michigan goes in 2024. 

Currently, Joe Biden is losing most of the polls there; he's underwater there, but it's likely that Joe Biden will have a resurgence in, maybe not popularity, but his polling numbers against Donald Trump as the election comes nearer. Trump is officially the Republican nominee and is possibly convicted in his numerous criminal trials of his new criminal offenses.

 Since it's roughly the state of the presidential election in Michigan is pretty much impossible to predict 7 months before the presidential race, it's even more difficult to predict how the Senate race two years from now will look. 

My best guess is that Gary Peters, or another Democrat, won't be facing an uphill battle, but they won't have the luxury of a clear Democratic lean in Michigan. 

There is a current Senate election going on in Michigan, with Elissa Slotkin, Democratic representative in a Trump district, facing off against, most likely, facing off against an unknown Republican. 

The race is considered by most to be slightly in the Democratic column, but if a strong or moderate Republican wins the primary, then that can successfully turn the race into a toss-up, a true toss-up. 

And how that race ends up going will suggest many things about 2026 and the Senate race. 

So, for Michigan, overall, it will take further clarification provided by the two prominent elections in 2024 to make a strong prediction about 2026.

Now, the thing about Michigan is that in 2022, Democrats had an extremely strong showing in the gubernatorial election, as well as the House elections, and even the state legislative elections. 

They gained a trifecta in the Michigan government for the first time in decades, with Democrats finally winning the state House and the state Senate, thanks to fair maps and also just an overall greater showing in the Midwest. 

Incumbent Democratic governor Gretchen Whitmer won her race by over 10 points against a very flawed Republican candidate, Tudor Dixon. 

But similarly, other state executive officers in Michigan, including Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, won their races by north of 10 points as well. 

Now, all of this might suggest a smashing Democratic victory in 2024 and beyond, but obviously, midterm elections aren't great predictors for presidential elections or elections in different years, in general. 

So, it really depends on if Michigan will shift rightward come November, to really make an accurate prediction about 2026.

GEORGIA

The second toss-up state, and the final state we'll mention today, is Georgia, one of the most competitive states in the nation, only recently. 

Now, for decades, in the late 20th century and the early 21st century, Georgia had a very clear Republican lean, both in margin and consistency, as conservative Democrats in the South finally eroded in support and were no longer able to win elections in Republican-leaning states. Democrats lost most, if not all, of their political influence in Georgia. 

Their last governor was Roy Barnes, and he was defeated by Republican Sonny Perdue in the 2002 Georgia gubernatorial election by over five points. 

Since then, no Democrat has won the governor's election in that state, and a similar story occurs with the Senate election. 

The last Democratic senator to have served in Georgia was Zell Miller, a very conservative Democrat. And once he retired, the 2004 Senate election in Georgia for his seat went to the Republicans by nearly 20 points. 

Since then, no Democrat has come very close to winning a Senate or gubernatorial election until 2018, when Democrat Stacey Abrams came within three points of winning the gubernatorial election against Brian Kemp. 

This election was arguably what reinvigorated Democratic hopes in Georgia, and they, by not, instead of nominating a conservative white Democrat in the hopes of gaining support from rural white voters who had deserted the Democrats for many years by now, they had rested their hopes in a young, black, arguably like, progressive candidate who had successfully managed to not only overperform these supposed old conservative Democrats but nearly come close to winning herself. 

Now, in 2020, Joe Biden was able to cement this trend as he won Georgia for the first time since 1992, and both of Georgia's Senate seats flipped from Republican to Democratic in the very unusual double runoff on January 5th, 2021. 

Now, the Democratic, the Democratic senator up for reelection in 2026 is Jon Ossoff. 

He defeated incumbent Senator David Perdue in 2020, which was a very impressive showing. 

David Perdue, as opposed to the other senator, Kelly Loeffler, was considered a fairly strong candidate, who at the beginning of the 2020 cycle wasn't thought to be vulnerable in the slightest, but Jon Ossoff had managed to turn that race into a true toss-up and eventually a Democratic victory by vigorously campaigning, avoiding blunders, and positioning himself as a liberal candidate who represents the interests of Georgians rather than Washington, D.C. 

And in 2026, and 2024, Georgia is bound to be one of the most hotly contested states in the nation. 

Current polling, as in most other swing states, shows Donald Trump with a notable advantage over Joe Biden, but personally, I believe this advantage will erode in the months coming. 

Ultimately, Georgia is impossible to really predict this early on in the presidential cycle, and even, it's possible that it's equally difficult to predict come September or October, or even November, simply because of its nearly 50/50 nature. 

That being said, 2026 is likely to be another toss-up race. Jon Ossoff is a strong candidate, but the Republicans have, have a likely strong candidate of their own in incumbent Republican Governor Brian Kemp. 

Kemp will be term-limited in 2026, after winning a very impressive nearly 8-point victory in 2022 over Stacey Abrams. 

If Kemp wins the nomination and faces Jon Ossoff, that race would be a true toss-up, if not slightly leaning towards the Republicans, simply because a midterm, with, generally speaking, lower black turnout and higher, would benefit Republicans to the point where Brian Kemp could successfully eke out a small, albeit clear, victory. 

However, it is not known whether he is running for the, for the seat, as of now, and, and therefore, the race remains in the toss-up.

MINNESOTA

Tina Smith, the incumbant Democrat, is serving her first term; she was elected in 2020, but was first elected in a special election two years prior. 

In 2020, Smith won by a somewhat underwhelming margin of around five points, but this can be attributed to a third-party candidate in Minnesota garnering nearly 6% of the vote. 

Now, going to take that into consideration when making predictions, which I intend to do. 

But think about Minnesota; it's pretty notorious for holding the longest Democratic voting streak in the nation on the presidential level. 

It hasn't gone Republican since 1972, when Richard Nixon won 49 states in his reelection victory. 

And while that may paint the picture that Minnesota is deeply Democratic, in the likes of Vermont or Rhode Island, for example, it really bears more resemblance to other neighboring Midwestern states like Michigan or Wisconsin. 

However, while Michigan and Wisconsin are marginal and are considered at the forefront of the presidential battleground, or on the Senate battleground, or on the House or gubernatorial battleground, Minnesota is usually on the fray of that arena. 

Minnesota went for Joe Biden by around seven points, and in 2022, Democrats won the governorship by a very healthy margin. 

In 2026, while a strong Republican, combined with a third-party presence detrimental to Democrats, I could see Tina Smith, potentially face a close election, maybe she’ll be forced into an under a five-point victory, and the best case scenario for Republicans. But ultimately, the prospect of Smith losing an election in a state where Democrats haven't lost the presidential in over 50 years, and where Democrats haven't lost a Senate seat since, and at least 20 years, it's difficult to imagine - and challenging to see 2026 finally being the Republican breakthrough in Minnesota.

VIRGINIA

My second likely Democratic prediction is in Virginia. 

Now, Virginia, for quite a long time in its history, had been a firmly Republican state. 

From around 1964 to Obama's victory in 2008, Virginia had voted for Republicans on the presidential level without fail, every single time. 

Now, when Obama finally won the state in 2008, that really cemented its leftward shift. It's gone for the Democrats in every presidential election since, and has only really increased in margin of victory, going from Obama's around 6-point victory in 2008 and 4-point victory in 2012. 

Hillary Clinton, in fact, surprisingly improved on Obama’s 2012 performance, winning the state by nearly five points. 

In 2020, Joe Biden arguably reached the Democratic ceiling in that state, for now, by winning Virginia by over 10 points against Donald Trump. 

The Democratic gains in the state were largely fueled by the suburbs, particularly around Washington, D.C., in Northern Virginia, shifting exponentially blue, especially in reaction to Trump's inflammatory rhetoric and personal failings, to the candidate, as well as the GOP's embrace of extremism, as a whole. 

Now, Democrats are very capable of losing in Virginia. 

This can be seen in 2021 when Democratic governor candidate Terry McAuliffe lost to Republican Glenn Youngkin in a surprise loss. 

But that election had more to do with Joe Biden's sagging approval at the time, possibly that made Virginia appear more red than it actually is. 

In 2022, Democrats returned to form slightly. 

There was no federal election to support this, but in the House elections, Democrats retained all but one of their seats and successfully won a very competitive House election, protecting one of their incumbents, Abigail Spanberger. 

While Democrats may not win Virginia by 10 points in 2024, I personally argue that they wouldn't by less, possibly like a fair amount less, like I could see Democrats winning Virginia by only around five or six points.

 If the election plays out with a Republican victory, I ultimately think that Virginia is unlikely to go to the Republicans in 2026, regardless of how bad the circumstances are for Democrats. 

It's at that point where the state is too much to the left that it would take a really, it would take a really gigantic national event, or a really talented Republican candidate, and a really flawed Democratic one, to really make the elections seriously competitive or put it in toss-up territory. 

NEW HAMPSHIRE

It's a similar story up in New Hampshire, which is the least Democratic of the New England states, even more so than Maine. 

But Democrat Jeanne Shaheen is very strong. 

She won her last election in 2020 by over 16 points. 

It's unlikely that Republicans will even bother to really put up a huge fight in the state, considering their previous candidate in 2022, Don Bolduc, lost by nine points, despite some polls showing him in the margin of error, or even winning that election. 

Simply put, New Hampshire has been a swing state for many, many years. 

It has shifted to the left to the point that you could pretty reliably say, or bet money on the fact that it's going to go Democrat in any given election.

Click here to read Senate 2026: Part 7

MAINE

Let's talk about the lean Republican states. I would put two states in this column, those being Maine and North Carolina. 

Now, if you remember back to 2020, Susan Collins successfully retained her seat by a very large margin, nearly nine points, while Joe Biden won that same state by nine points himself - meaning he overperformed Donald Trump by around 18 points, which is an incredible showing, one that you don't really see that often in modern political times, where most everything is extremely polarized and partisan. 

I think if Susan Collins runs for reelection, then she will very likely win another term. I would put Maine in the likely Republican column if she does run for reelection. 

She has served; she is serving her fifth term currently. 

Collins has served since 1997, and is one of the longest-serving congresswoman - so it’s possible that she’s therefore less likely to run for reelection. However, she has filed paperwork to fundraise for another campaign, which does suggest that she is planning to run again. 

However, assuming Collins retires, and I would immediately put Maine in the lean Democratic column, or possibly even the likely Democratic column, because Joe Biden is likely to win the state by over five points, at the very least. And in 2026, it would take a real Republican wave to successfully prevent Democrats from winning the Senate election. 

In 2022, Maine Republicans faced a real setback. 

Past Governor Paul LePage lost to incumbent Democrat Janet Mills by nearly 14 points, which is a far cry from his earlier victories earlier in the 21st century. 

In 2026, it's hard to conjure up another strong Republican currently in the political stratosphere. 

However, there are a few strong Democrats in the waiting, such as Jared Golden, who is holding the most Republican seat to be represented by a Democrat in the House, Maine's second district, which voted for Trump by around seven points. 

Golden's held that seat three times for the Democrats, and he would arguably be Democrats' strongest candidate. 

Democrats’ representative in Maine's First District, Chellie Pingree, would also be a promising candidate for Democrats.

Republicans simply do not have much of a bench at the current moment, so if Collins were to retire, and with either one of these Democrats running, it would really seem that Democrats have a firm advantage in that race. 

Now, there is also the possibility that Susan Collins runs, and Jared Golden or Chellie Pingree, but more Golden, runs, and that race, I would consider to be fairly evenly matched, maybe with a slight advantage going towards Collins, who has performed, has been more of an overperformer than Golden, relatively speaking. 

However, that race would really be neck and neck, and I, you'd need more polling data and you need to be in closer proximity to the election than we are now to really have a firmer analysis of how that race is going to turn out. 

But for now, assuming that Collins is likely to run, Maine is going to be at leans Republican, despite it being a fairly Democratic state at the presidential level.

NORTH CAROLINA

The second and final leans Republican state is North Carolina. 

North Carolina has been an elusive target and a painful one for Democrats since their victory in 2008, in the Senate and presidential elections. 

Democrats haven't won either of those elections since that point, despite their best efforts and despite those elections being very close. 

Republicans have not won a presidential election in North Carolina by over five points since 2008, and in 2020, Donald Trump was only able to even win it by two points.

The last Democrat to serve as a senator in North Carolina was Kay Hagan, who had won in 2008 by around a 9-point margin against incumbent Republican Elizabeth Dole. 

However, Dole lost her seat in 2014 to current Senator Thom Tillis by a very small margin, but it was still a loss nonetheless.

And since that point, Democrats haven't controlled a single one of North Carolina's Senate seats. 

And this all goes to show that North Carolina has a very small but persistent red tilt, and it is being hotly contested in 2024, as it should be, by both parties. 

But as most of the polling shows, and as I would personally predict, I believe North Carolina will probably stay in the Republican column in 2024, and it would suggest that in 2026, North Carolina is also going to remain Republican. 

Thom Tillis being a fairly uncontroversial conservative, but not extremist, Republican. 

However, there are a couple of ifs that I'd like to talk about, is mostly speculation, but can really shake up the dynamics of the race, most notably with the fact that Democrats have two great candidates who might be interested in the seat. 

Democrats have fielded pretty good candidates in the past; 

In 2020, they fielded Cal Cunningham, who was a good candidate until allegations of a sexual affair emerged that sunk his campaign.

And then in 2022, state supreme court Chief Justice Cheri Beasley was also considered a strong candidate, who put up a good showing by only losing by around three points, despite depressed Democratic turnout, mostly with Black voters in the state. 

So, Democrats have not really done a poor job at fielding candidates.

And in 2026, they have two very, arguably great candidates, and current governor Roy Cooper, who is currently serving his second term, and first-term Democratic representative Jeff Jackson, who is currently running for attorney general in 2024. 

Starting off with Jeff Jackson, he originally ran for Senate in 2022 but dropped out during the primary in an effort to aid Cheri Beasley's candidacy, and what was arguably like a little bit of a political quid pro quo, he was able to secure the newly redistricted 14th District, which is centered in Charlotte, and he won that district with ease. 

However, now that Republicans control the Supreme Court, and they are redistricting the state once again, in a highly unusual circumstance, North Carolina's 14th District is looking like a key target for Republicans to convert into a more conservative district. 

Therefore, Jackson is running for attorney general, and that race is arguably a toss-up. I haven't formally rated it, but he is a strong candidate. 

It's unclear who Jackson will face, but he has a very good shot at winning if he runs a well-financed and mistake-free campaign. 

Assuming Jackson wins the attorney general spot, that would be a great launching pad for a Senate run two years later. Winning the attorney general spot would powerful evidence to voters, to analysts, to the United States of America, that Jackson can win North Carolina on a statewide level. 

Now, the attorney general position is different than the Senate position. Senate seats are federal offices; attorney general seats are statewide offices. 

The qualifications are different, but ultimately, North Carolinians are most likely to cast the same vote for president, senator, and attorney general, and governor. 

They're unlikely to really discriminate in one of the positions or the other. 

All of this is to say that 2024 really acts as like a test, or a litmus test, or a rite of passage for Jeff Jackson, to see if he has what it takes, and if he proves that he does in the attorney general race, then I'd argue that he could maybe make North Carolina a toss-up. 

The incumbent Republican in a state that went to Donald Trump by three points, at the same time,

Moving on, I'd argue the stronger of the two candidates is Roy Cooper, the incumbent, second-term governor of North Carolina. 

Now, going back into his history, Cooper defeated incumbent Governor Pat McCrory, a Republican, in 2016, albeit by an extremely small margin, less than half a point, yet still a fairly impressive victory, nevertheless, considering he beat an incumbent in a year where Donald Trump won the presidential level by three points. 

In 2020, Cooper put up an equally impressive performance by winning reelection with 51.5% of the vote, or nearly a 5-point margin of victory. 

That is a very impressive showing for a Democrat in North Carolina, and since Cooper will be term-limited in 2024, he's not running for reelection this year, and he'll be out of office by January 2025.

Cooper’s probably going to be wondering if it's a good idea to either ride off into the sunset and pass on the torch to the next Democrat(s), or if he might as well see if he has the electoral credibility to successfully win the elusive Senate election in North Carolina. 

That could be an appealing opportunity if Cooper wants to remain in the political field. It's really his only option at this point, barring a House race that wouldn't really make much political sense for him. 

And if Cooper won that election, that would provide him with a great national profile. Who knows, maybe he could be drafted as a vice president, or even run for president himself.  He'd have a very nice electoral appeal, being the only Democrat to win consistently in North Carolina. 

Now, all of this is to say that Democrats have a good opportunity in North Carolina. 

But ultimately, for the time being, with all of these things being speculation, the state has proven to be more red than blue, even if it's by a very small amount, and seems to be holding true in 2024, and I would suspect that to hold true in 2026 as well.

Click here to read Senate 2026: Part 7

Now, let's talk about the likely states for Republicans. 

IOWA

I would start off with Iowa, which is teetering on the edge between likely and a safe state for Republicans. 

Two-term Republican Joni Ernst, like I mentioned before, was re-elected in 2020 by 6 points. 

Not a great showing, but considering 2020 was a relatively Democratic year, and it's unlikely that she'll decrease in her electoral strength, considering she's more ingrained with Iowans now than she was 6 years ago. 

Ernst's had time to really make herself a household name, one that more Iowans will just consider voting for when they hit the poll booth. 

It will be a harder sell for a Democrat to win that race, especially considering Iowa as a whole has experienced a massive shift rightward, even since the 2010s.

 In 2022, Chuck Grassley, the nearly 90-year-old incumbent, won by nearly 15 points, and that was his worst showing. 

Simply, those two things go far to demonstrate how it would take something very impactful for a Republican to lose a race in Iowa. 

Yet, it is possible, if there is a very strong Democratic candidate.

ALASKA

The other Republican likely state in 2026 is Alaska. 

Now, Alaska is an interesting case. 

It has been a Republican-winning state for as long as it's been a state, since the 1960s. 

It hasn't gone Democratic since 1964 when Lyndon B. Johnson won essentially every state in the Union outside of the Deep South. 

But Alaska has gotten bluer.

In 2020, Donald Trump only won the state by 10 points, after Republican presidential victories nearly in the twenties in the years prior. 

So, Alaska is getting bluer. 

Independent Bill Walker had served as the Alaskan governor, more resembling a Democrat than a Republican, and the state's at-large congressional seat, so essentially a statewide election, went blue in 2022, in the special election to replace dean of the house, Don Young, when he died, unfortunately. 

Democrat Mary Peltola won the ensuing special election, and what was considered a very shocking upset, and she successfully won the regular election in November '22, garnering a nearly 10-point victory over Republican Sarah Palin in the final round of ranked-choice voting. 

Now, Peltola has proven to be exceptionally popular, and if she was to enter the Senate race, she would look like a very competitive candidate, if not the favorite. 

The incumbent Republican in Alaska is Dan Sullivan. 

In 2020, Democrats, like other states, seriously contested his seat. 

They gave it a good shot by nominating independent candidate Al Gross. Yet, Al Gross lost by nearly 13 points, despite polls showing a much closer race.

Now, polls in Alaska are known to be very unreliable, since Alaska is so large in landmass and so sparsely populated. It's a very difficult state to poll reliably. 

So, it's hard to trust what early polling of the race we have in 2026 right now, that might show a Peltola victory, or that might show her being insanely popular. 

So, really, it seems like Alaska's more likely than not going to go to the Republicans, if Mary Peltola does not run. I would consider Alaska to be a safe Republican state. If she does run, and Dan Sullivan runs for reelection, I would consider that race to be leans Republican, for the time being. 

I think she has a real shot at winning that race. 

But ultimately, like, gun to my head, I would assume that Dan Sullivan would be able to eke out a victory. 

He's a fairly uncontroversial Republican. He doesn't have a very big national profile, which may seem detrimental to his chances, but in reality, that just means his constituents probably have a higher opinion of him, and he's more familiar back home in the Last Frontier state. 

The final possibility is that Peltola runs, and then Dan Sullivan retires. 

Now, Dan Sullivan, he's not an old guy. 

He is around 60 years old right now, and he's only been serving since 2015. I could, I don't think it's likely he retires. Sullivan hasn't said much about it, and, but on the slight chance that he does retire, and Peltola runs, I think that race might even be in toss-up territory. Peltola was a very strong candidate. 

There's a potential that a really weak Republican, like Sarah Palin, runs, or Nick Begich, both of which had already been defeated by her in the House election two times. 

If Peltola was up against either of them, for sure, I see her winning that race in Alaska. 

But overall, considering all those possibilities, I peg that as likely Republican for now.

TEXAS

The final likely Republican state is Texas. 

Now, if you go back to 2020, I mentioned that Democrats were feeling very optimistic about their chances in that state as a whole, after Beto O'Rourke's shockingly close loss in 2018 to Ted Cruz, losing by under three points. 

And yet, the Democrat in 2020, MJ Hegar, lost to John Cornyn, the incumbent Republican senator, by nearly 10 points. 

Now, Cornyn was a much stronger incumbent than Ted Cruz was, and MJ Hegar, and probably less strong than Beto O'Rourke. But a 10-point victory in Texas, especially considering that John Cornyn is likely to be running, and be the nominee in 2026, it all paints a very pessimistic picture for Democrats in Texas. 

It has been shifting left in the 21st century. 

Joe Biden's 5.6% loss in 2020 represents the best showing for a Democrat in that state in quite a while, probably since Bill Clinton. 

Now, just because a Democrat is shifting left, and because I ultimately think it will eventually tilt into the Democratic column, I don't think that will occur in 2026, barring any really extraneous circumstances, like if Cornyn retires, and he's replaced by just an abhorrent Republican candidate. 

There are many, but it's unlikely there's one who is just terrible enough to cause Republicans that race, and Democrats would need a very strong candidate likewise to win that race. 

Beto O'Rourke has arguably tarnished a lot of his goodwill with Texans after running for president in 2020 and staking a lot of positions, like on things like guns, which are very unpopular with Texans back home. 

And that really was all shown when he ran for governor of Texas in 2022. O'Rourke lost by over 10 points to incumbent Greg Abbott, despite many controversies in the Republican governor's second term, which Beto O'Rourke attempted to use to his advantage but ultimately failed. 

Now, all of this, in my opinion, goes to show that in 2026, it would really take somewhat of a miracle, an electoral miracle, for a Democrat to finally win a Senate seat in Texas. 

That hasn't happened since, I believe, the 1980s, with Lloyd Bentsen. 

Now, that wraps up the likely Republican states.

Click to read Senate 2026: Part 5

Calls as of late 2023

So, on to the safe states for the Democrats. 

OREGON

I would personally rate Oregon as a safe state. 

Incumbent Jeff Merkley is a very strong incumbent. 

Since his first election in 2008, where he defeated incumbent Senator Gordon Smith, who was a Republican, by around 3 or 4 points, he has not faced a serious challenge in the Senate for a very long time. 

It's unlikely that 2026 will finally be the year to give him a real challenge either. 

NEW MEXICO

Moving down to New Mexico, this is another state which, it is not a sea of blue like California or Vermont is, but it is unmistakably blue.

 It has a very clear blue tint, and Ben Ray Luján, the one-term Democrat who has been serving since 2021, won his first term in 2020 by nearly six points. 

Not a great showing, but it's likely he'll improve that, and six points, honestly, seems like the lowest bar that a Democrat could really receive. 

I would consider Democrats to have a very good, very nearly 100% chance of retaining the seat come 2026. 

COLORODO

It's a similar story in Colorado, where Senator John Hickenlooper, who was originally the governor of Colorado, is very likely to win a third term in 2026, as Colorado only continues to shift towards the Democrats. 

That could be very much seen in 2022, when Governor Jared Polis nearly won reelection by 20 points, and Democratic Senator John Bennett nearly won reelection by 15, both of which were terrific performances, especially considering 2022 all around was a better year than 2020. 

ILLINOIS

Now, on to Illinois, which has been a safe Democratic seat for quite a while, around since the 1990s. Chicago has grown in population, and its surrounding suburbs, the collar counties, have only gotten bluer and more populous, and the rural downstate areas have only decreased in population. 

That's a state where incumbent Dick Durbin, who is the second in command Democratic senator in the caucus, looks very likely to win, or if he retires, another Democratic candidate will fairly certainly win that election as well. 

MASSACHUSETTS & RHODE ISLAND

Massachusetts and Rhode Island, both Northeastern states which are among the bluest in the nation, also seem likely to return their Democrats to the Senate without much hassle. 

NEW JERSEY

A similar story with New Jersey, where prominent Democrat Cory Booker looks poised to run and win another term. 

DELAWARE

Go a little down south, you see something similar in Delaware, which is Joe Biden's home state. 

That would likely retain Chris Coons, who is now serving his second term. 

That wraps up the safe states for the Democrats.

 Of all of those states, New Mexico is the closest to being "likely," I would say, simply because looking at 2020 and the preceding elections, it is slightly less blue, but it's retained a very firm Democratic tint. 

It's hard to see how that changes in 2026, barring a very strong Republican entering the race, which just doesn't seem likely at this point. 

Click to read Senate 2026: Part 4

Introduction

Okay, so let's talk about the 2026 United States Senate elections. 

This is pre-2024, so a lot of factors, like the Senate balance, are not determined. 

Who's the president, who's going to be the president in 2026, that's also not determined. 

Notably, 2026 is a midterm, and the way midterms will go usually depends a lot on the party of the president, usually in their second or sixth year in office. 

Most presidents are underwater in their midterms: 

Take a look at Obama’s two midterms, in 2010 and in 2014, respectively. In both, he saw a pretty significant dip in popularity.

In 2010, Obama had just passed the Affordable Care Act after a pretty long legislative battle. and he faced an economic recession. The dip in his popularity was reflected in the midterm election result. 

Democrats lost 63 seats in the House of Representatives. Democrats had a pretty big majority from 2008 and 2006, but after 2010, they were capped at under 200 seats in the House — a very small minority compared to previous congresses. And in the Senate, Democrats lost six seats. 

Now, prior to 2010, Democrats’ had a pretty big majority; they controlled 57 seats in the Senate. After 2010, Democrats had 51 seats - so still a majority. 

Fast-forward to 2014, Obama's second midterm, the Democrats lost seven seats, pushing them down to 44 seats in the Senate, and they also lost more seats in the House. 

All of this goes to show that midterms are often not great times for the incumbent president. 

The same dip happened in 2018, President Trump's first midterm, when Republicans lost the House by losing 41 seats. 

Republicans gained seats in the Senate, but that's mostly due to the unbalanced composition of the Senate map that year. 

But midterms aren't always the worst for the incumbent president. 

If you look just one and a half years ago — in 2022 — Joe Biden, who was very unpopular, successfully kept the Senate. In fact, Democrats gained a seat in Pennsylvania. 

Democrats lost only nine seats in the House, when some prominent forecasters projected them to lose as many as 30 or 40. 

There were some special factors in this election that prevented things from going the same way as 2010 or 2014 for Biden, namely: the overturning of Roe v. Wade, and a lot of extremists among the Republican candidates. But it still goes to show that midterms aren’t necessarily always unfavorable to the incumbent party. 

And so now, looking ahead to 2026, arguably, there are two main scenarios that’ll impact outcomes greatly:

• The first of them is that Joe Biden wins reelection in 2024, and it will be his second midterm. 

• And the other scenario is that Donald Trump wins the election, making it his second midterm after the one in 2018 … but really the first midterm of his new term. 

Right now, it's impossible to predict whether something else will happen that will change the situation or the state of the elections. 

But I would wager that if Joe Biden is president, the midterm will probably not go the way he wants or Democrats want.

And if Donald Trump is president, I suspect that the country will vote in spades against him and the Republicans in 2026, just as they did in 2018. 

So, I'll consider both of those two possibilities while making the predictions. 

SAFE FOR REPUBLICANS

Now, I'm going to start with the safe seats, seats that, regardless of most circumstances, unless something really crazy happens, regardless of whether it's Trump or Biden sitting in the Oval Office, I could fairly reliably say that these seats will stay in the same hands as they normally do, and I would be willing to bet money on these. 

So, to start off, for the Republicans, their safe states are:

IDAHO

Call: Senate seat safe for Republicans. 

That would be Republican Jim Risch. He's currently serving his third term. 

In 2020, the last election, he was up for reelection; he was reelected with 63% of the vote. It's difficult to see that election going any other way, even if he retires. 

WYOMING

The same thing with Wyoming, where first-term Republican Cynthia Lummis was elected in 2020 with 73% of the vote. 

That's nearly three-quarters of the vote. 

It's hard to see how that changes substantially in 6 years. 

SOUTH DAKOTA

The same thing with South Dakota, where the incumbent is Mike Rounds. He was a popular governor before being elected. 

A more marginal state than the ones I mentioned before, it only went for Trump by around 15 points, and Democrats did contest this seat 6 years ago with Barbara Bollier, a Republican state senator who ran for the seat as a Democrat. 

Yet, despite a lot of investment on the state level, she ultimately still lost the seat by around 13 points. 

So, a small overperformance, but not really a significant one. 

OKLAHOMA

For the time being, additional safe states for the Republicans include Oklahoma. 

That's one of the most Republican states in the nation, like around 2/3 of voters leaning Republican. 

ARKANSAS

The same thing with Arkansas, where Democrats didn't even bother contesting the Senate seat six years ago, and instead, a Libertarian faced off against incumbent Tom Cotton and gained around 30% of the vote, so pretty irrelevant. 

LOUISIANA

The same thing with Louisiana, which again, not as unanimously Republican as the other states I've mentioned, but still, there's no real chance Democrats will win it. 

MISSISSIPPI & ALABAMA

I also include Mississippi and Alabama. 

Alabama is a little bit funny because only 6 years ago, the Democrat held that seat. Democrat Doug Jones, he won a special election, and where he benefited from Trump's unpopularity and a really terrible Republican candidate, one of the worst candidates in the 21st century, with Roy Moore, who was accused of child molestation. 

Sadly, he, for the Democrats, he lost his seat by 20 points in 2020 against Tommy Tuberville, and considering he was a very strong Democrat, he was an incumbent, he was probably the best person Democrats could have fielded, and he only, he couldn't even muster 40% of the vote. 

It's very difficult to see how any other Democrat is going to come closer in Alabama. 

TENNESSEE & KENTUCKY

Finally, Tennessee is looking safe for the Republicans as well, as Kentucky. 

Kentucky was a state that Democrats did contest very seriously in 2020 with Amy McGrath, mostly because they faced off against the really unpopular Senate Majority Leader at the time, Mitch McConnell. 

He had like consistently under 40% popularity in most polls, and Democrats invested over 100 million dollars in their candidate, yet McGrath was unable to muster even 40% of the vote against him. 

McGrath ultimately lost by over 20 points. 

Another state where it's really hard to see Democrats making a resurgence, for the time being, that's Kentucky. 

WEST VIRGINIA & SOUTH CAROLINA

Additionally, West Virginia is looking safe for Republicans, and South Carolina is looking safe for the Republicans. 

South Carolina was also one of those states, like Kentucky, which was very seriously contested by Democrats six years earlier, in 2020. 

Lindsey Graham, another nationally unpopular figure who was closely associated with Trump's first term, seen as an ally or sycophant in Congress, Democrat Jamie Harrison, now the head of the DNC, he ran against him in 2020. 

A lot of money was spent, again nearly 100 million, or perhaps more than that. He could not even come close either; he lost by 11 points to Lindsey Graham, while Joe Biden lost by around 14 or 15 to Donald Trump. 

Again, it's an overperformance but not one that could really yield a Democratic win. For the time being, so those were all the safe states. 

MONTANA

Oh, and Montana, which was in Democratic control as recently as 2014 with Max Baucus. But since then, Steve Daines has won every election by at least around 10 points or so, and it's unlikely he'll face another strong opponent like Steve Bullock, who was the governor when he faced off against Daines in 2020. 

It's unlikely that Daines will face another serious challenge in 2026, so he should be resting happily for the time being. 

Continue to Senate 2026: Part 2