That Patchwork's StatesDecide2024 Election Kit
State-by-state, seat-by-seat original electoral data to give you a better understanding of election results.
It’s Election Day and That Patchwork’s StatesDecide2024 Election Kit is here!
But first some “firsts” depending on who wins the presidential elections:
If former President Trump wins:
First president to win non-consecutive terms since 1884.
Oldest person to be elected president
First president to win after being impeached
First president to win with multiple indictments
If Vice President Harris wins:
First woman elected president
First racial minority woman elected president
First elected Democrat to succeed another living elected Democrat since 1856.
First president to ascend directly to the presidency from the vice presidency, since 1988.
Your StatesDecide2024 Election Kit
2024 Electoral Index Scores, Competitive States: Just about every outlet measures partisan composition purely with presidential election results. That Patchwork finds this reductive and misleading as it obscures the important ways states vary in their partisan composition depending on the office. A more comprehensive snapshot of the 12 most competitive states for the presidency and the Senate gives you a strong baseline from which to observe election results as they come in. Election margins and/or seat share margins are calculated for state and federal offices in order to create an electoral index which is display as net Democratic margin. State measures are comprised of averaging the two-party margin of the last two gubernatorial elections and accounting for the seat margin of each party in each state’s legislative chamber. Federal measures are comprised of a 75/25 weighted blend of statewide House vote shares and seat shares, respectively, in each state’s congressional delegation, the two party-margin of the last four federal senate elections in each state, and the average two-party margin of the last two presidential elections in each state. For the federal measures, House margins are weighted at 24 percent with senate and presidential indices weighted at 38 percent each.The state and federal indices are averaged together to produce the master index score for each state.
2024 Presidential Election, Key Performance Counties: A list of 24 counties — 12 for each candidate — to better guage the performance of Vice President Harris and former President Trump. Though these counties may or may not reflect the outcome of the election in each state, the margins will provide important clues. Four bonus counties are also listed below to gauge candidate support in non-competitive states but areas that may offer insights around candidate strength as a share of the popular vote.
2024 Gubernatorial Electoral Index. Eleven states hold elections for governor this year. Eight of those states are currently held by Republicans with three held by Democrats. This index supplies a baseline for better gauging the strength of the candidates going into the night. The data is based on the net Democrat two-party vote margin of the last two full-term gubernatorial elections for each seat.
2024 U.S. Senate Electoral Index, by Seat. Another original composition by That Patchwork shows the electoral index score of each of the 100 U.S. Senate seats based on the net Democrat two-party vote margin of the last two full-term Senate elections for each seat.
Plus Additional Reading from That Patchwork:
The Power Is The Threat
As the presidential race tightens, Democrats are making one last case against Donald Trump. Recently, he’s been likened to a fascist, which, in the American mind, usually implies to one specific figure. One could easily argue that Trump’s political style is authoritarian, but what no lawmaker or journalist seems willing to discuss is what lies upstream …
Updated: The Actual Closest U.S. Presidential Elections in History
As the presidential election nears and early voting begins as early as mid-September in some states like Pennsylvania, this year’s presidential election is looking especially close—though it may not wind up that way. Democrats and journalists often state that Joe Biden was elected by 7 million votes, a figure known as the popular vote, which in a federation is not binding, much less formally documented anywhere. In a union of states, if you’re not paying attention to the states, then you’re not paying attention.
Who Is Winning Over America?
The result looks like this. There are 28 states in the union that, overall, lean Republican and 22 states that overall lean toward Democrats. Overall, Republicans lead Democrats electorally across the federation by 4 points. For decades up until as late as the 2010s, Democrats were competitive if not dominant in the states. Since then, Republicans have been on the offensive as Democrats have shifted toward notching federal victories.
The U.S. Senate Isn’t Rigged
The coalition Donald Trump assembled to get elected president was supposed to be implausible given the Republican Party’s purportedly shrinking base. Few realized that he was expanding it.
In a political media dominated by national narratives, That Patchwork is the only newsletter about democracy from a decentralist angle. To preserve democratic pluralism means challenging the primacy of national narratives that presume central power knows best.
