Fast forward to the year 2024. Pretend you are a campaign advisor to either the Republican candidate (it might be Trump but we don’t know for sure) or the Democratic candidate (it might be Biden but we don’t know for sure). You will be designing a campaign plan for your candidate to win the Electoral College vote and thus the presidency. It does not matter which candidate/political party you pick to advise, just choose one or the other.
There are three main elements to your plan.
Take a look at the state by state results for the 2020 election. I want you to look at the results of all 50 states and choose which states you are going to try to win and tally up the electoral votes from each of those states. For example, Washington is considered a safe Democratic state. So if you are designing a plan for the Democrat, you should plan to win in Washington state and its 12 electoral votes. If you are an advisor for the Republican, you should probably ignore Washington and compete in states where you have a better chance like Alabama. (If you are a Democratic advisor, you should probably ignore Alabama).
As you make a list of all the states where you hope to compete and win, including all of the “safe states” where you are very confident that you’ll win, make sure that they add up to at least 270 electoral votes. If you are doing this correctly, you will probably be trying to win around 315-350 electoral votes so that you have some margin of error. Remember most states are “winner take all” for their electoral votes. For the purpose of this assignment, you can treat Nebraska and Maine as winner take all states, too. This means if you are trying to win Nebraska, assume you’ll get all 5 electoral votes from that state.
The final part of your plan is to figure out how you will spend $500 million in campaign funds. States with more electoral votes should get more campaign money than states with fewer electoral votes. So, it would be reasonable for a state with 4 electoral votes to get $4 million and a state with 7 electoral votes to get $7 million. States that are considered “swing states” should get even more money because there is more at stake there. Each state must receive at least $1 million in campaign funding, even if you do not plan on trying to win that state. So again, Republicans will need to spend $1 million in Washington state, even if you are not planning on competing here. This money will help other Republicans who are running for other offices and maybe narrow the likely margin of victory for the Democrat. Note: As you saw in the video about the Electoral College, occasionally there are landslide elections where candidates win nearly every state. But the last time a Republican won in Washington for president was 1984.
Important point: If you are not devoting a lot of money in states like Arizona and Pennsylvania, you are doing something wrong. Those are both considered “swing states” which means they are fairly evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans. And Pennsylvania should get more money than Arizona because it has more electoral votes. (Pennsylvania has 19, Arizona has 11). California is not a swing state because Biden won there by 29% points in 2020 so there is not a need to spend a ton of money there.
After you have made notes for your plan by doing the steps listed above, answer the following questions. (This is what you will turn in as your assignment).
Step 1: Write the following at the beginning of your assignment: I am putting together a plan for the Democrats or I am putting together a plan for the Republicans. Make a list of all the states — including the “safe states” where you expect to compete in the 2024 election (abbreviations are fine. Example: I am putting a campaign plan together for the Republicans. I will compete in Alaska, Alabama, Arkansas, etc). This list should include both safe states that you expect to win and swing states where you hope to win, so I’m guessing your list is going to include 25-35 states or so. Next, assume you win every single one of those states in your list. Tally up the electoral votes from those states and provide that number in this part of the assignment.
Step 2: Provide a list of the top 5 states for your campaign spending. Tell me how much you are spending in each state. Example: 1) Pennsylvania, spending $30 million.
3. Briefly describe your overall campaign strategy in 4-6 sentences. (As a Republican, I wanted to focus on trying to win back Wisconsin and Michigan so I put a lot of money into those two states in addition to the other swing states).
Most of the work for this assignment is in looking at the states and figuring out which ones to compete in and which ones to leave behind. As a general hint, if the results from 2020 show that a particular state was within 5-6 percentage points, I would probably consider those swing states. Or look at the chart from 270 to win (link below) which indicates swing states (toss up states) in light brown shading. That should helpful to you in creating this plan.
Here are two great links where you can just hover of the states to see the results in 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/03/us/elections/results-president.html
https://www.usatoday.com/elections/results/2020-11-03/presidential/?itm_source=oembed&itm_medium=news&itm_campaign=electionresults-home&itm_content=presidential
This is a little hard to believe, but some political junkies are already creating electoral college maps for 2024. This link from 270towin.com is helpful because it contains the updated electoral votes for each state following the 2020 census. For example, a lot of people moved to Florida in the past 10 years so they went from having 29 electoral votes in 2020 to having 30 electoral votes for 2024. So, I strongly encourage you to use this site so that you have accurate numbers of electoral votes for each state. Here is the link: https://www.270towin.com/
Last Completed Projects
| topic title | academic level | Writer | delivered |
|---|