Swing States: States That Can Decide the 2016 Presidential Election

A handful of states, during the course of every presidential campaign, become an unusually BFD to the rest of the Union. Called swing states, these holdouts cannot be relied upon to vote definitively Democratic or Republican, but can heavily influence the outcome of an election, depending on whether they swing red or blue. A candidate needs 270 electoral votes to win the presidency, and the votes in the swing states are up for grabs. These are the areas that candidates will target most aggressively, and the ones everyone will be watching from the start of primary election season in February all the way through election night. Reporting on a study conducted by the Center for American Progress...