Seven states will decide this election. And if I sound like a broken record, it’s because I want everyone to have these as well-memorized as I do: Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

The district-based electoral votes in Maine and Nebraska will also matter a huge deal. But it’s hard to say “seven states and two districts.” This system is stupid and confusing enough as it is.

So, seven states. That doesn’t mean other states don’t “matter”—they matter up and down the ballot. We must win everywhere. But for purposes of the presidential election, if Trump wins Minnesota or New Hampshire, he’s already won the other seven states. And if Biden wins Texas or Ohio or Iowa, he’s already won those other seven states. Let’s work to make that happen! But the first priority is the first priority: Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

Those national polls showing Biden winning by a great deal or double-digits are great! But they’re not measuring the electoral college. (For what it’s worth, we’re tracking the presidential race privately at Civiqs and we’re seeing a mid-single digit Biden lead.) Biden will rack up votes on the entire West Coast (and especially California, which is 12% of the nation’s population) and the Northeast—the two most populous areas of the nation.

Furthermore, what were once ginormous Republican leads in Texas, the nation’s second-largest state, are now single digits and getting shorter by the day. Democrats won’t win the state absent a massive landslide, but the margins will be narrower. Every other state in which Republicans have large margins are either mid-size or small states. So yes, the national polling will look good for us, but the national polling doesn’t account for freakin’ Wyoming having three electoral votes, despite being smaller than, well … despite this:

x Census Bureau recently released new state and county population estimates for 7/1/2019. I was curious how many counties have an est. population greater than Wyoming (the least populous state with an estimated pop of 578,759) --> 116 counties across 33 states have a greater pop. pic.twitter.com/gr0rAaCZKt — Barry (@BMcM2018) April 8, 2020

Can you believe it? 116 counties have a greater population than the entire state of Wyoming, without getting three electoral college votes.

So yes, this system sucks, but it’s the system we have to deal with. So how do Trump approvals look in the states that will decide the presidential election? Arizona (44-54), Florida (46-51), Georgia (47-50), Michigan (44-53), North Carolina (44-54), Pennsylvania (46-51), and Wisconsin (46-51).

Interestingly, Trump has net-negative approval ratings in one more 2016 red state: Iowa (47-50), but we haven’t seen evidence it’s competitive at the presidential level. Keep an eye on it. And if we’re playing in Nebraska (and we should!), it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to contest the rest of the state. It’s cheap.

In any case, there’s value in national polling—whatever trends we see there show up in the states as well. If Biden goes up a couple of points nationally, odds are that he’s also going up a couple of points in those key seven states. So yes, track the trends.

But if you really want to know what our chances of victory look like, keep an eye on those seven states. Georgia is a slight Trump lean; the rest are all effectively ties. So every point that Trump loses for being Trump matters.

P.S. All seven of these states saw a “Trump bump” during the initial weeks of the novel coronavirus outbreak, but it’s gone in all of them. Two examples:

Wisconsin:

x Civiqs Results

Florida:

x Civiqs Results

And we haven’t even seen the worst of it yet.