Presidential campaign events in 2024
This post was updated on November 6, 2024.
When it comes to presidential campaign events, not all states are created equal.
FairVote tracked every event featuring the Democratic and Republican candidates for president and vice president between the party conventions and Election Day. As the tracker below shows, presidential campaigns held nearly all of their events in just a few swing states – states that are narrowly divided and could vote for either candidate – while ignoring the vast majority of voters who live elsewhere.
The reason is the way we choose our president. Americans don’t get to vote for the president directly. Instead, we vote to choose our states’ members of the Electoral College, who then vote for the president on our behalf. This system creates an incentive for candidates to campaign almost exclusively in swing states, rather than reach out to voters in all states. For instance, if you live in Wyoming, Virginia, or Vermont, the campaigns won’t make an effort to appeal to you solely because of where you live.
From the party conventions through Election Day, there were 261 in-person presidential campaign events. 94% of those were held in just seven swing states – Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Just 16 presidential campaign events were held in the rest of the country combined, and 32 states didn’t receive a single visit from a candidate.
The skew of campaign attention toward swing states is just one notable aspect of the Electoral College. Another aspect is the possibility of “faithless electors” – electors who don’t vote for the candidate they pledged to support. FairVote recently posted an analysis of faithless electors here.
For more information on presidential elections, and event trackers from the 2016 and 2020 campaigns, visit this page.
