Which are the two most important swing states? Do you see Pennsylvania and Michigan as being more crucial to win than Wisconsin? For example.

The question of which states are most important in the 2024 presidential election came up in a recent live chat we hosted.

In conversations with campaign officials for Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, it is clear that there are three critical swing states: Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. If Harris wins all three of those, plus one electoral vote in Nebraska, and keeps the Democratic strongholds, she wins 270 electoral votes exactly. That pathway, officials believe, is Democrats’ best chance of winning.

That being said, if you are looking only at pure electoral value, Pennsylvania has the most electoral votes with 19, followed by Michigan with 15 and Wisconsin with 10.

But since President Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race, Democrats believe Harris has a better chance of winning some of the other battleground states that would give her an alternate path to 270 electoral votes. In particular, polls show Harris is more competitive than Biden in Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina.

In a memo released July 24, Jen O’Malley Dillon, the Harris campaign chair, wrote this about Harris’s path to 270: “We continue to focus on the Blue Wall states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania — and the Sun Belt states of North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada, where the Vice President’s advantages with young voters, Black voters, and Latino voters will be important to our multiple pathways to 270 electoral votes.”

Republicans also see those seven states — Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada — as the core battlegrounds. Trump campaign officials argue their task is easier because as long as they hold North Carolina they only need to win Georgia and Pennsylvania to surpass 270 electoral votes. “She’s still playing defense,” a senior Trump adviser told reporters in August.

The Trump campaign previously flirted with raids into bluer territory such as Virginia and Minnesota, but those ambitions faded as Harris replaced Biden and polls tightened. Donald Trump himself has publicly mused about winning New York and New Jersey, but his campaign is not seriously contesting those states.