A guide to the 2024 swing states – and why they could be a problem for Kamala Harris

Donald Trump is likely to face Kamala Harris in the 2024 election after Joe Biden dropped out of the race.

America was left reeling when Trump, 78, narrowly escaped an assassination attempt at a rally in Pennsylvania on the eve of the Republican national convention.

Mr Biden was already fighting for his political life following a disastrous debate performance against his Republican rival.

Kamala Harris is likely to be chosen as his replacement.

With the election just a few months away, the campaigns are focusing on the battleground states which will ultimately decide the outcome of what is likely to be an extremely tight race.

What are swing states?

The classification of “swing state” is not official, and pollsters disagree over which states are most important for candidates going into each race.

Broadly speaking, a swing state is where both major parties enjoy similar levels of support among the voting population – with the Democrats and Republicans within a few percentage points of each other in polls.

In this presidential race, the critical states are likely to be Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

In six of the seven – all but Florida – Mr Biden beat Mr Trump in 2020, giving him a lead that allowed him to win the White House.

Why are swing states important?

Swing states matter because almost all states use a “winner takes all” system for allocating the votes of the state in a presidential race.

Even if one candidate wins by a very narrow margin – as Mr Biden did in Georgia in 2020 – 48 of the 50 states will allocate all of their delegates to that candidate to vote in the Electoral College.

The Electoral College is the body that ultimately determines the winner of a presidential election, by representing each of the states in a vote.

Only in Maine and Nebraska are votes allocated on a more proportional basis, with two delegates instructed to vote for the overall winner in the state, and the remainder asked to represent the result in each congressional district.

The weighting of these votes means that winning a narrow swing state can have a disproportionate impact on the result – making them vital in securing the presidency.

As Hillary Clinton found out in 2016, winning more votes than the other candidate does not mean winning the election. In some states, the location of voters matters as much as their choice of candidate.

Which states have become Democrat?

Mr Biden’s 2020 election victory in Arizona was surprising to some observers, as the state had only voted once for the Democrats since 1976.

The state had voted for Mr Trump in the 2016 election, and consistently voted for the Republican candidate even in elections they did not win at a national level, including in 2008 and 2012.

Georgia, a stalwart Republican state between 1996 and 2016, chose to take a chance on Mr Biden in 2020 and hand him a knife-edge victory that Mr Trump sought to overturn. That incident is now the subject of state legal proceedings against Mr Trump and his team.

In both of those states, Mr Biden’s support now looks shaky – and could spell trouble for him in 2024.

Which states do Republicans need?

The Republicans must win back their former heartlands from Mr Biden, and attempt to win over traditionally Democratic states if their candidate has a chance of winning the 2024 election.

There are already positive signs for the party in Florida – a state once considered one of the closest races, but that has since become more strongly Republican. Ron DeSantis, the second-placed GOP primary candidate, is the state’s governor.

In North Carolina, Mr Trump won narrowly in 2020 and his campaign is looking to extend that lead in 2024, if he is chosen as the Republican nominee.

Winning Pennsylvania, which has voted Democrat in every presidential race but one since 1992, would be a major coup for the Republicans in 2024. Not only has the state been a focus for the Biden administration’s “Bidenomics” policies, it also contains the city of Scranton, the president’s birthplace.

Pennsylvania’s voting history is mirrored in Michigan, which also chose the Republicans in only one election since 1992. The state is the heart of the American automobile industry, and contains hundreds of thousands of blue-collar workers whom both Mr Biden and Mr Trump have targeted in their early campaigns.

Why  polls show trouble for Ms Harris

A White House race between Ms Harris and Trump would be a tight contest decided by a narrow sliver of voters, according to early polling.

The likely Democratic nominee is currently trailing the Republican leader by two points nationally, slightly closer than Mr Biden, data from Real Clear Polling show.

But, like Mr Biden, Ms Harris appears to be trailing Trump in all six swing states.

Trump has a narrower lead over the vice-president in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, the blue wall swing states the Democrats need to cling to if they want to win the election.

But she is far behind in battleground states Georgia, Nevada and Arizona, where Trump’s lead is currently more than five per cent.

In Nevada, Ms Harris trails Trump by 8.6 per cent, where polls showed Mr Biden losing by 5.2 per cent. However the polling data between Ms Harris and Trump in battleground states is limited.

Meanwhile, the most recent New York Times/Siena College poll of Pennsylvania found 42 per cent viewed Ms Harris favourable, 11 per cent fewer than those who said they liked Mr Biden ahead of the 2020 election.

However, Ms Harris has not yet officially been anointed the party’s nominee, nor has she selected a running mate, both of which are likely to influence voters.

Political scientists said they predict a close election, similar to the outcomes of most of the elections this century.

“We have not seen a runaway re-election landslide like the kind that Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon had, or Lyndon Johnson had at all since 2000,” Christopher Galdieri, professor of politics at Saint Anselm College, told The Telegraph.

He said that while Ms Harris won’t be “bogged down by Biden’s age” and other negative connotations, in swing states in the industrial Midwest she may not be able to win over the same coalition of voters.

“As a black woman, she’s probably not going to appeal to the white working class voters who saw Biden as, you know, culturally in step with themselves,” Mr Galdieri said.

“I think it’s not that she can’t win there, but I think if she does win there, it’s with a coalition that looks a little bit different from the one that Biden won with in 2020,” he said.