The Four Swing States That Could Matter Most

The 2024 presidential election is, according to where the polls stand right now, confoundingly close.

The most recent national New York Times/Siena College poll showed Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump tied, while our polling average shows Harris with a slim, two-percentage-point lead.

And each of the seven battleground states that will probably determine the outcome of the election is just about as narrowly divided — or even more so.

This meant that my mission for today was hard.

I wanted to bring you, my dear and busy readers, a slimmed-down list of states that can best help you understand the presidential election, hoping to home in on a combination of blue wall and Sun Belt battlegrounds that rise above the rest to tell the story of how this thing might go. When I got stuck, I called Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst, who said he, too, found the battlegrounds difficult to narrow down.

“Everything is so close,” he said, “that even though things are really stable, even the tiniest movement is sufficient to change the whole outcome.”

To put it another way: In this election, everything — and everywhere — matters. It’s a battle of inches, one in which whole states and key groups of voters are behaving a little differently than they have in the past, and that makes it hard to know where exactly the electoral tipping point will be. Both candidates are battling it out across the map.