Measuring the Strategic Value of States in the U.S. Electoral College

Abstract

The United States’ Electoral College (EC) system continues to raise questions about how much influence each citizen and state holds in presidential elections. Traditional power indices, such as the Banzhaf and Shapley-Shubik power indices, quantify state influence through weighted voting games, focusing on how coalitions of states can reach the 270-vote threshold. While informative, these measures overlook a key factor, i.e., the competitiveness of the two-party vote within each state. Wright (2009) addressed this by combining EC weight and competitiveness in a retrospective, rank-based model that identifies the state most likely to have been decisive in past elections. This article builds on that work by (1) introducing a simpler, transparent measure, strategic value, defined as the product of a state’s EC seat share and its competitiveness, and (2) evaluating the prospective predictive validity of this measure for campaign visits, in contrast to Wright’s retrospective ranking. Using lagged presidential election inputs (2012→2016; 2016→2020), strategic value positively predicts subsequent candidate visits in OLS models, with results robust to a negative binomial specification appropriate for over-dispersed counts. While these results are limited to the elections studied, strategic value performs more consistently than traditional indices, suggesting it offers a practical and accessible framework for evaluating state-level importance and, with caution, anticipating campaign strategy.