Swing State Solver is in no way associated with the Harris campaign. The views and analysis expressed here are our own.
Using polling data released before October 17
One vote in the right location can do more than hundreds of thousands elsewhere.
Consider this scenario: Harris wins the popular vote by a significant margin, with strong performances in populous states like New York and California. Yet, she still loses the presidency. Why? Because of the distribution of electoral votes.
To win, Harris needs 270 electoral votes. These are primarily allocated based on state-level results, not overall vote counts. This means that voters in key states have an outsized impact on the electoral college tally.
We have conducted millions of election simulations - exploring countless potential outcomes. We update this analysis daily, using the latest polling data to identify the most efficient path to Harris's victory.
This approach allows us to pinpoint where supporter efforts can have the greatest impact on the electoral college results.
Based on present polling, here is the easiest path for Harris to win the presidency.
The states that are likely to take the most effort to win are in the lower right.
Don't get overconfident,
and gamble for a larger victory.
Focus your effort to get a more likely victory.
Sure, we want that landslide victory, where state after state chooses Harris. But, politics offers a more painful choice. Do we focus our work and get a more likely victory, or spread out our efforts and get a lottery ticket for a landslide win.
We should pass on the lottery and get to work.
We can divide political effort into two categories:
Structural effort can be hard to redirect. Sometimes these are focused in a particular state or town and can't be moved. This includes campaign offices, local voter knowledge, in-person volunteer networks.
Tactical effort can be easy to shift. It's easy to move online ads from targeting voters in Georgia to voters in Pennsylvania, or change the phone numbers volunteers call.
Because the easy path shifts, we want to be ready for it and have some structural effort in all the swing states.
However, tactical effort can be focused where it is needed at that moment. When needs change, we can change the focus.
Here is how to divide the tactical effort budget. This allocates more effort to the areas where Harris needs to convince more voters.
As our efforts work, it should be reflected in updated polling. Then this budgeting system will slowly move the effort to other areas needed to win the election.
We only win the election by winning the whole group of states. So we need to make sure we are balancing our efforts across them.
The amount of tactical effort in an area should match the size of the task.
To help us budget our Structural Effort, we want to know where we should be prepared to spend tactical effort if needed. In other words, which states are likely to be in future easiest paths.
To estimate this, let's look at:
We want to build structural systems in states that would have a big impact on the election if they voted for Harris (point 1) and where additional effort in the state matters (point 2).
This value combines a state's impact on the election and how likely it is to switch parties.
If a state has high impact, and could really be lost (or won), it is very important.
Harris supporters need to be prepared to put in a lot of effort in important states.
This expresses how much wining a state shifts the chances of winning the presidency.
Higher values mean more impact. States with many electoral votes, like Texas and Florida have big values here. But, this also depends on whether Harris has alternative ways to win the presidency without this state, and how likely those alternatives are.
This is the differences between the probability of winning if Harris wins the state and if she loses it.
As every time traveler learns, when you take action based on what the future will be, you change that future.
As we act, Harris' chance of winning each state shifts. So which states are the most important shift too.
We redo our analysis every day. The plot below shows how state importance has changed recently.
Each color is a different state, its line shows how its rank changes as new polling data becomes available.
Luckily, supporters like us can refocus our efforts as the world changes.