With the election a dead heat, the race will likely come down to seven main battleground states: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada. Neither candidate leads in The Hill/Decision Desk HQ polling average of any state by more than 2 points.
Each candidate would need to win at least three or four of those states to clinch victory, depending on the state’s electoral votes.
Harris’s most straightforward path to victory may be along the “blue wall,” which has played prominently in the last two elections. Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin gave Trump the presidency in 2016, and they flipped back to blue for President Biden in 2020.
If Harris wins all three and a single electoral vote from Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District, she would have enough to win. Nebraska is one of two states, along with Maine, that distributes their electoral votes by congressional district.
If the vice president is able to win in Georgia or North Carolina, it would give her some more breathing room if she falls short in one of the blue wall states.
Trump’s best chance may run through the Sun Belt, with Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina giving him his largest polling leads, although only marginally. But taking these three states alone would not be enough, and he would need to pick off at least one of the blue wall states to put him over.
Since Nevada only has six electoral votes, it is relatively unlikely to be the tipping point state unless the electoral map’s math falls in a certain way. But Pennsylvania may be the most likely with its 19 electoral votes, the most of any of the swing states.
Users can play around with the map and different hypotheticals on the DDHQ/The Hill forecast model here.
