Election Day is less than six months away and voters have a familiar choice of President Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Unless it’s The Godfather Part II, sequels generally never really live up to the original. While the main attraction looks like a 2020 repeat on the surface, the star players are competing in a different game, under different rules, and with greater stakes. This Washington Examiner series, Judgment Day: Why 2024 rematch won’t be any old sequel, investigates the key differences from 2020. Part One is on the changes across the Electoral College map.
The 2024 election may be a rematch, but President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump‘s paths to 270 electoral votes and the presidency may not be the same this time around.
That’s because the 2020 Census has tinkered with the Electoral College map and the campaigns’ electoral math, with Nebraska, typically a flyover state, tipped to be more important to Biden and Trump this November.
If the 2020 election were rerun today, Biden would win 303 electoral votes to Trump’s 235, or three fewer votes compared to four years ago, according to Sabato’s Crystal Ball managing editor Kyle Kondik. Similarly, if the 2024 results are the same as 2016, Trump would receive 306 votes to then-Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton‘s 232, or two more than the upset victory that vaulted Trump to the White House.
That’s because California, Illinois, Michigan, New York, and Pennsylvania — states Biden won in 2020 —lost one vote each after the Census, with Colorado and Oregon gaining votes, for a net loss of three votes. Simultaneously, Trump’s states of Florida, Montana, North Carolina, and Texas gained five votes, though Ohio and West Virginia lost two, for a net gain of three.
“So the overall map is slightly worse for [Biden], and slightly better for Trump,” Kondik told the Washington Examiner.
Trump currently has the polling edge in critical battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin which more than secure his political comeback. Not satisfied, friendly Nebraska Republicans have speculated that they could change the state’s election laws to no longer divide three of its electoral votes by its congressional districts. Historically, Republican presidential candidates have won Nebraska’s two statewide and two rural congressional district votes, with Democrats receiving Omaha’s counterpart.
With Trump poised to lock in 235 votes of the 270 needed under the new electoral map with reliably red states, that Omaha vote becomes more important if he wins Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada. That’s because the former president would have 268 votes, according to University of Texas, Austin government professor Daron Shaw.
“That means even winning the 2nd Congressional District in Nebraska would get him a tie,” Shaw, a Pew Elections Performance Index adviser, told the Washington Examiner. “Flipping anything else — Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Virginia — would be for the win.”
“Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania may be enough for Biden, but he literally has no room for error,” he said.
That’s why there’s been so much conjecture regarding Nebraska’s election laws, regardless of the likelihood lawmakers can and will change them, Kondik agreed.
“Biden could afford to lose Arizona, Nevada, and Georgia, but still win if he held everything else from 2020, including [Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District],” Kondik said. “Losing it would drop the race to a 269-269 tie, which Republicans would likely win if the election went to the House tiebreaker.”
If there is a tie, the House would decide the presidency next January through what’s called a contingent election. Pursuant to that process, the House’s 50 state congressional delegations would have one vote each, with Republicans expected to win a majority of the delegations in November, even if they don’t win the majority of seats overall for the speakership.
If Nebraska does not change its law, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Election Data and Science Lab director Charles Stewart predicted Arizona would become a “pivotal” state.
“The Trump vote in Maine is probably more secure than the Biden vote in Nebraska, but that doesn’t change the national calculus,” Stewart told the Washington Examiner.
For Stewart, the election will be determined by the “fundamentals of campaigning” as the “national swing gets distributed to the states,” with Trump having a national polling average advantage over Biden of three percentage points.
“Lots of the national swing that gets written about from the national polling reflects ‘wasted’ votes going from Biden to Trump,” Stewart, the California Institute of Technology-MIT Voting Technology Project co-director, said. “That is, if Biden is losing Hispanic votes in New York, California, and Texas, it doesn’t matter for the result. Now, if he loses them in Arizona, that’s a big deal.”
“If current trends continue and Biden remains weak in Georgia, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, he loses, regardless of the shift in electoral votes,” he added. “The only thing that would save Biden in that scenario would be something like the abortion initiative in Florida bringing out enough extra Biden votes to swing that state, but that’s a huge stretch to imagine that would occur.”
The Biden campaign declined to respond to questions pertaining to hypotheticals, but has projected confidence in public memos that the president has “multiple clear paths to victory through a number of critical swing states.”
“We also aren’t taking any state or any vote for granted and are building strong teams to shore up important building block states to 270 such as Colorado, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Mexico, and Virginia, while expanding the map in places like Florida and Texas,” Biden campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez wrote in March.
“At this stage in the race, we’re being strategic about keeping multiple pathways to 270 electoral votes,” Biden spokeswoman Lauren Hitt additionally told the Washington Post in February. “Since the president was elected in 2020, we’ve made significant and ongoing investments in state parties and on-the-ground infrastructure. We saw the results of those investments when Democrats greatly surpassed pundit predictions and won statewide elections in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada in 2022. We’re continuing to build on those results for 2024.”
That’s talk, but in terms of action, since the start of the year, Biden has been to Pennsylvania six times; New York and Wisconsin four times; and North Carolina, Texas, and Virginia three times. California, Florida, Nevada, South Carolina, Georgia, and Michigan have seen Biden twice in 2024; while Arizona, Illinois, Maryland, New Hampshire, Ohio, and Washington have had one visit, excluding the president’s trips to Delaware.
Beyond his travel for the Republican primary early states, Trump has been to Michigan three times; North Carolina and Wisconsin twice; and Georgia, Nevada, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia once, not including his trips to Washington, D.C. and in Florida.
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With Trump stuck in a New York courtroom because of his hush money trial, Trump campaign managers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles have countered with how Biden has had to spend “millions on paid TV to shore up traditional Democrat constituencies in the battleground states.”
“We don’t hate it in the Trump campaign,” the pair wrote last month. “Biden’s approval rating has fallen to 35% in the new Quinnipiac survey. Watching Joe Biden spend millions to stay just above the water line is proof of their situation. And it’s crazy at this stage of the race.”