By Grayson Jones, Staff Writer
As the 2024 election heats up, CNN has described the coming election as “the closest of the century.”[1] The nation is on a knife’s edge, as both Democrats and Republicans hope their candidate wins. However, even with a fairly comfortable 2-point margin in the popular vote per FiveThirtyEight, the election is still either candidate’s to win.[2] Polling data suggests that Pennsylvania is one of the tightest battlegrounds in the nation, much how Florida was in 2000. As of today, Kamala Harris holds a narrow lead of less than one percent here in Pennsylvania, as well as in Nevada.[3] Trump holds the same narrow lead in North Carolina, Georgia, and Arizona.[4]
In 2000, George W. Bush won the Electoral College despite losing the popular vote by around 500,000 votes nationwide. It came down to just 500 votes (less than one-hundredth of a percent) in Florida. The map in Figure 1 below (courtesy of 270toWin) shows the 2000 electoral map with the popular vote margins.[5]
The 2024 map looks somewhat similar – though Oregon, Colorado, New Mexico, Virginia, and New Hampshire have become reliably blue, and Iowa, Missouri, Tennessee, and Florida have become reliably red. The electoral vote has also concentrated itself more in the “Sun Belt” and out of the Midwest and Rust Belt regions.[6]
It is certainly within the realm of possibility that the election could rest in the hands of Pennsylvania voters. Will there be another Supreme Court case to determine who won the election? If so, will the justices Trump appointed to the Court in his first term recuse themselves, will they show impartiality and look at the election objectively, or will they show themselves to be partisan and biased in favor of the president who appointed them? Only time will tell.
The case of Bush v. Gore is almost shockingly similar – Gore also led by about two percent, was the incumbent Vice President, and had small margins in key swing states with 3 weeks to go until election day. Depending on the poll, however, Bush would also take the lead in some surveys[7]. However, Bush was the son of a former president, not the former President himself.
In the weeks following the election, the Supreme Court heard compelling arguments from Bush’s campaign, Gore’s campaign, Florida’s election officials, and more. The Court ultimately decided that “Despite violating the Fourteenth Amendment by using disparate vote-counting procedures in different counties, Florida did not need to complete a recount in the 2000 presidential election because it could not be accomplished in a constitutionally valid way within the time limit set by federal law for resolving these controversies”[8]. Hopefully, regardless of who wins the election in November, we do not have to have the courts make their decision – or worse, an electoral tie and contingent election. This election season is shaping up to be one of the most unpredictable, if not the most unpredictable.
With that, I hope that everyone exercises their civic duty by voting this election, and win or lose, everyone behaves civilly in the aftermath and pushes back against authoritarianism at home and abroad.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/22/politics/closest-presidential-race-harris-trump/index.html
[2] https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/2024/national/?ex_cid=abcpromo
[3] https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2024-election-forecast/
[4] https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2024-election-forecast/
[5] https://www.270towin.com/2000_Election/
[6] https://www.270towin.com/maps/bj7nQ
[7] https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/legacy-pdf/26.pdf
