Are ‘Battleground States’ Such Battlegrounds?
My sister the eagle-eyed lawyer sent me this pic from a Philadelphia corner where she is in one of thirty busloads of New Yorkers who have come down to Pennsylvania this weekend to start ramping up the GOTV effort in the Keystone State.
Pennsylvania is considered to be one of the most important ‘battleground states’ because it’s got 20 electoral votes which is 7.4% of the total electoral votes that Kamala and Tim need to win the whole goddamn thing.
I have been listening to all this talk about ‘battleground states’ in this Presidential campaign, in the same way that I have also been listening to all those experts who claim that the whole Electoral College thing needs to be jettisoned because just a bunch of states where there are more cows than people can determine who owns the Oval Office for the next four years.
So, since I always get a little suspicious when a bunch of so-called pundits keep saying the same thing, and say it again and again, I decided to take a look at past election results in the Keystone State and compare those numbers to how the national voting turns out every four years.
Here’s what I have found by looking at ten previous Presidential elections beginning in 1960 (which is when I first started following politics) followed by the election results in 1972, 1980 and…