The 2024 general election is heating up, with President Biden and former President Trump traveling the country as their parties’ presumptive nominees.
Both candidates have already made several stops in key battleground states and will be a regular presence there over the next 6 1/2 months. Even if tens of millions of people vote in general elections across the country, only about a half-dozen states are likely to determine the race.
The Electoral College requires candidates to pay attention to the math of which combination of states will guarantee victory. This interactive map from Decision Desk HQ and The Hill shows all the possible paths candidates can take to win enough votes.
Here are Trump and Biden’s most likely paths to Electoral College victory:
Biden’s path
Biden Sweeps All 2020 States
Biden has seen some reasons to be more hopeful lately when it comes to the polls. Biden and Trump are essentially tied in average national polls from The Hill/Decision Desk HQ, and several recent polls have shown Biden leading by a few points nationwide.
The polls that haven’t been as positive are those in the battleground states that Biden will need to have a path to re-election. He has been trailing in several of the states he would need — including some he won in 2020 — by a few points for months.
But he has improved recently in some states that will be crucial to his path, and he still has several paths to winning the election, like Trump.
The most obvious path for Biden to win in November is to recreate the electoral strategy that brought him to the White House in 2020. That would involve winning the key swing states he won four years ago: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. If he were to win those states, Trump could still win North Carolina and Biden would be reelected.
Winning the coalition of states in 2020 would net Biden 303 electoral votes to 235 for Trump. Due to the redistricting process that took place after the election, that would be three fewer electoral votes than the 306 he had four years ago.
But from a historical perspective, this seems unlikely. Throughout US history, there have never been two consecutive presidential elections in which all states voted for the same party, although this is possible.
Biden wins ‘blue wall’ states
Polls show reasons for Biden to be concerned in several of these states, such as Georgia, where Trump has consistently led. But if Trump ends up winning Georgia, Arizona and Nevada, Biden could still pull off a victory as long as he holds on to a trio of “blue wall” states: Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
A Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll last month showed Biden still down but narrowing Trump’s lead, especially in these three.
If he were to win all three of these states, Biden would have 269 electoral votes, needing just one more from some other battleground state to put him over the top.
Nebraska and Maine distribute their electoral votes in part by which candidate wins each of their congressional districts, rather than the winner-take-all system of the other states. Maine’s 2nd Congressional District voted comfortably for Trump in the last two elections, but Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District narrowly voted for Trump in 2016 before flipping to Biden in 2020.
If Biden manages to keep just that congressional district along with the blue wall, he would not need any other states to be reelected, reaching the threshold of 270.
Trump’s path
Trump wins all major battlegrounds
The former president appears to have the electoral advantage in the main states necessary for a winning coalition and expressed confidence, at least based on the recent situation of the numbers.
Based on an average of polls from The Hill/Decision Desk headquarters, Trump leads Biden by a few points in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and North Carolina, five of the seven swing states likely to determine the election and enough to get him above the 270 electoral votes he needs.
Trump narrowly leads Biden, by less than a percentage point, in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, the other two key swing states.
If the election were held now and the vote with Trump ahead was correct in all seven states, Trump would comfortably defeat Biden in the Electoral College, 312 electoral votes to 226. This would include all five key states that Biden flipped in 2020 to place him. It ended up – Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – moving back into the Republican column this year.
Trump wins combination of Sun Belt and industrial states
If Trump failed in the two states where he and Biden are essentially neck and neck – Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – but stayed with the others, he would still win, albeit by a narrower margin, with 283 electoral votes to Biden’s 255.
Of course, in the Electoral College not all states have equal weight, and some states receive more valuable prizes based on their populations. Pennsylvania, with its 19 electoral votes; Georgia, with its 16 electoral votes; and Michigan, with its 15 electoral votes, may be more likely to increase its candidate total more quickly, but Nevada’s six votes could be critical in a particularly close race.
Of all the battleground states Trump has his eye on, he will be able to count on North Carolina’s 16 electoral votes. It was the only state of these seven that Biden did not win four years ago.
The state has also narrowly voted for the Republican presidential candidate in every election since 2012, despite strong Democratic efforts to win the state. If Trump holds the Tar Heel state again, he will need to win three or four of the remaining battleground states to secure a victory.
That would still be the case for Biden, but losing North Carolina would make it more important for Biden than for Trump that he carry at least two of the three biggest remaining battleground states — Pennsylvania, Georgia and Michigan.
If Trump wins North Carolina and the state where he currently has the biggest lead in The Hill/Decision Desk HQ’s polling average, Georgia, he would need to win just two in Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Biden would need at least three in this scenario.
An unlikely but possible scenario is a 269-269 Electoral College tie between Biden and Trump. This would happen if Biden maintains the blue wall with Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, but Trump wins the other battlegrounds of Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina, as well as the 2nd congressional districts of Maine and Nebraska.
If this happens, the election will be decided by the Chamber, with each state having one vote decided by the majority of its delegation. In the current makeup of the House, Republicans have a majority of House delegations in 26 states, while Democrats have a majority in 22 states, and two states are evenly split between Democrats and Republicans.
That likely means Biden would have to win the Electoral College outright because Trump would be in a better position to win in a tiebreaker decided by the House.
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