The Most Important States in the 2020 US Election (what Math says)

I wanted to figure out which states are most important in the 2020 elections. I asked my kids, Taso 16, and Luka 18 years old because they are good at math.

Here is what they came up with:

We decided the the presidency and the Senate are equally important and didn’t worry about the House.

The first thing is to figure out which states are swingier. We used the Partisan Voter Index (PVI) made by the Cook Political Report. It has been around over twenty years and is authoritative. It lists how far from even between Democrats and Republicans the states lean. There are a few states that are even and they go all the way up to Wyoming which is +25 Republican. For our purposes we don’t care if a state leans Republican or Democratic we just want to know how close or lopsided it is between support for the two parties. We then set up a swinginess quotient which puts +25 (Wyoming) at 0 (zero), all the way to the even states to 1 (one).

The big states have many more electoral votes than the smaller states. They vary between three all the way to fifty five for California. Even though California is only moderately swingy, because it is so giant, it would be over represented in terms of importance in the presidential race so we needed to find a way to keep the field within a tighter range. We did this by taking the square root of the number of electoral votes they have.

Then we multiplied the swinginess quotient (0–1) times the square root of the number of electoral votes.

For the Senate, we took the field of the square roots of electoral college members (the square root of three or 1.732 all the way to the square root of fifty five, 7.416) and said the first would be for those states with no senate elections in 2020. The second would be for those states with two Senate elections in 2020, there are only two. Those states with one senate election in 2020 got an average of the two numbers, 4.574 points. Then to get the Senate importance number we multiplied that times the same swinginess quotient we’d used before.

Then we added the presidential importance number and the senate importance number, and got a general number, then we ranked them.

And here are the top twenty. There were some surprises for me:

Georgia
Arizona
Michigan
Virginia
North Carolina

Minnesota
Texas
Colorado
New Hampshire
Florida

Illinois
Pennsylvania
Iowa
New Mexico
New Jersey

Maine
Oregon
Ohio
South Carolina
Wisconsin

Here is the whole thing.