The U.S. presidential election likely hinges on the outcome in seven political battleground states, which means candidates often spend larger amounts of time and resources on those states.
So, after a weekend off the campaign trail, Republican former President Donald Trump and his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, are headed this week to some of the key states.
Trump on Monday is set to address members of the National Guard Association of the United States during the group’s conference in Detroit. It will be his seventh visit this year to the state of Michigan, which he won in 2016 during his successful presidential campaign. However, he lost the state in 2020, when he lost his reelection bid to President Joe Biden.
Trump’s vice presidential running mate, Ohio Senator JD Vance, is staging a rally Tuesday in the small city of Big Rapids, Michigan. Trump returns to the state Thursday, delivering remarks at a steel plant in Potterville, where he plans to talk about the U.S. economy, consumer price inflation and manufacturing. Trump is then heading to the neighboring state of Wisconsin for a town hall with voters in La Crosse.
On Friday, Trump is planning a rally in the eastern city of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, before heading to Washington to speak to a conservative group called Moms for Liberty.
Starting Wednesday, Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, are taking a bus trip through several cities in the southern battleground state of Georgia, culminating Thursday night with a Harris rally in Savannah. Biden narrowly won the state over Trump in 2020, the first time a Democratic presidential candidate had won the state since 1992.
It is Harris’ seventh trip to Georgia this year and her second to Savannah.
Even before her successful Democratic National Convention last week, national polling showed Harris edging ahead of Trump and she could get a post-convention, perhaps temporary, bump in the polls as well. Pollsters say she now is ahead of Trump nationally by 2 or 3 percentage points.
But the importance of the four states where Harris and Trump and their ticket mates are campaigning this week, along with the mid-Atlantic state of North Carolina and Western U.S. states of Arizona and Nevada, cannot be overstated.
The seven battleground states are likely to dominate the travels of all four of the presidential and vice presidential candidates leading up to Election Day on November 5. Early voting in some states begins the last two weeks of September.
The highly contested states play an outsized role in determining the outcome of the election because the U.S. does not pick its president and vice president by the national popular vote.
Rather, the election is 50 state-by-state contests, with electors for the winning ticket in all but two states casting all their votes in the Electoral College for either Harris-Walz or Trump-Vance. Electoral College votes are based on population, so the most populous states hold the most sway.
In the battleground states, polling shows the eventual outcome is too close to call, while either Trump or Harris has a clear edge in the likely outcome, barring an upset, in the other 43 states.
The Washington Post said its polls currently show Harris ahead narrowly in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, while Trump holds a slight edge in the other four battleground states.
Trump lost the national popular vote in both 2016 and 2020 but won the Electoral College vote in 2016 and lost it in 2020.
The Harris campaign said Sunday it has now raised $540 million for the 10-week sprint to Election Day, much of it to be spent on television advertising in the battleground states. It said $82 million of the total was raised during the four days of the party convention last week.
Trump has also raised considerable sums, although less than Harris. His campaign reported $327 million in cash on hand at the start of August.
