Naomi Lim of the Washington Examiner reports on former President Donald Trump’s electoral challenges.
While President Joe Biden’s campaign this week repeated its hope of expanding his 2024 electoral map to flip Florida and Texas, states former President Donald Trump won in 2020, Trump is holding on to hope he can flip New York and New Jersey.
But although New York could be closer this election cycle, at least according to early polling, Trump has already expanded his map by putting battleground states Biden won four years ago back into play, per some political pundits.
For example, Columbia University political scientist Donald Green downplayed Trump’s hope of flipping New York and New Jersey as “bluster” but contended his 2024 electoral map will likely expand beyond what it was in 2020.
“He wasn’t wrong in saying that he would expand the map in 2016 because he ultimately did win the Rust Belt states,” Green told the Washington Examiner of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. “What’s bluster and what’s real is obviously a matter of opinion, but it’s almost certainly true that states that were not so closely in play in 2020 are going to be more closely contested this time around.”
“I think of Arizona, in particular, Nevada, Georgia to be among them,” the professor said. “North Carolina went for Trump last time and in 2016 too. It may more decisively this time. Virginia is probably a bridge too far for him, but if Biden’s numbers fall off and there’s a, what’s called by political scientists, uniform relative swing in the direction of Trump, states that are relatively close will become quite competitive.”
A uniform relative swing is more commonly known as a wave election. For instance, if 2 percentage points were hypothetically added to Trump’s 2020 vote totals, “states that he lost, he would win, and many states that were not even that close, would be in contention,” according to Green.
