Battleground States –
A Tug-of-War for Hearts, Minds, Votes

Two versions:

Presidential (updated for 2020 election)

Senate for for 2020, 2022 and beyond (coming soon)

Overview and Process
Your students will have two distinct roles:
A) They’ll live and vote in one of the five Battleground States (BGS)
B) They’ll do a limited number of standard election activities
a) Create a campaign theme/slogan
b) Give speeches and answer questions at the Audience Forum
c) Do phone-banking and emailing
d) Take polls
e) Use social media tools
f) Create radio and TV ads
g) Do Get Out the Vote (GOTV) activities

On Election Day, your students vote in their assigned states. Then, using the forms and the Excel spreadsheet provided, you will be able to calculate the Electoral College (EC) and Popular votes.

I hope you and your class enjoy the simulation. In researching the five presidential elections so far in this century (and looking forward to the election this year), I discovered that a handful of states (aka the battleground or purple states) have essentially determined who became president. So I created a simulation to explore this in a classroom.

In the first four these elections (2000–2016), most states were either solidly Democratic (Blue) or solidly Republican (Red). In other words, most states voted for the same party in all four elections. There were two states (North Carolina and Indiana) that went Republican three out of the four times and three states (New Mexico, Iowa and New Hampshire) that did the same for the Democrats. But there were only five states (Colorado, Florida, Nevada, Ohio and Virginia), where each party won twice during that time period. Those five states were the focus of the 2016 version of this simulation. However a major shift occurred in the 2016 election where an number of blue states turned red, allowing Donald Trump to win the election. This year’s simulation also focusses on five Battleground State, but with the exception of Florida and Iowa, this year I choose the three states that been reliable blue but changed to red. These states are: Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Those three states plus Iowa and Florida are my 2020 Battleground States.