Presidential Election 2024: States with the Most & Least Powerful Voters

With the Presidential Election only two weeks away, swing states are on candidates’ radar. But how much sway does a swing state have? For that matter, does a winner-take-all state like California hold any sway?

WalletHub just published the States with the Most & Least Powerful Voters.

Would it surprise you to learn that Nevada is ranked #1 most powerful swing state? Or that California is ranked #42, with very little influence?

As important is the Electoral College, which is how Nevada is a swing state, and that the most populous states, California, Texas and New York, are not determining our presidential elections.

The Heritage Foundation explains:

The Founders struggled to satisfy each state’s demand for greater representation, while attempting to balance popular sovereignty against the risk posed to the minority from majoritarian rule. Smaller states, in particular, worried that a system that apportioned representatives based on population would underrepresent their interests in the federal structure. This concern, that either the big states, or the small states, would have too much influence over the choice of the President, was voiced by many of the delegates at the Convention. They understood the dangers that a direct democracy, with the potential for mob rule, brings to elections. James Madison warned that:

[In a direct democracy], [a] common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a communication and concert results from the form of government itself; and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.²

After long and serious debate, they arrived at an intentional design for electing the President that would incorporate the will of the people, but still safeguard against faction and tyranny. That system, the Electoral College, balances the competing interests of large states with those of smaller states. By allocating electors based on a state’s cumulative representation in the House and Senate, the Electoral College system avoids purely population-based representation, while still giving larger states greater electoral weight. This design incorporates the “genius of a popular democracy organized on the federal principle,”³ and has been our electoral system that has operated successfully for over 200 years.

Here is a map of the Electoral College from 270towin.com:

How did WalletHub calculate the most and least powerful states?

For presidential elections, we used the “win probabilities” calculated by YouGov and graded each state election on a 100-point scale, with 100 points being awarded to the states with literally a 50 percent chance of swinging either Red or Blue (50-50) and 0 points to the states with zero chance of one party determining the election (100-0).

We then multiplied the win probability score by the number of electors of a given state and divided the product by the state’s population aged 18 and older. Finally, we multiplied the result by 1,000,000 in order to calculate the Presidential Election Voter Power Score for that state.

Data used to create these rankings is courtesy of the U.S. Census Bureau, fivethirtyeight.com, YouGov and archives.gov.