I hope you and your class enjoy the simulation. In researching recent elections, I discovered that a handful of states—commonly known as battleground or purple states—had essentially determined who became president and who controlled the Senate. So I created a simulation to explore both these races in a classroom. Because 2024 is a presidential election year (since it’s divisible by 4), but to keep the focus on the voting, you’ll be doing a single set of campaign activities for both races (the Democrats will have a presidential and a senatorial candidate and the Republicans will have the same). Then everyone will vote, but separately for each race.

Presidential Battlegrounds

In the first four of these elections (2000–2012), 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. North Carolina and Indiana went Republican three out of four times, and New Mexico, Iowa and New Hampshire did the same for the Democrats. But there were five states—Colorado, Florida, Nevada, Ohio and Virginia—where each party won twice during that time period. Those five battleground states were the focus of the 2016 version of this simulation. But a major shift occurred in the actual 2016 election: Three reliably blue states—Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin—turned red, allowing Donald Trump to win the election.

In the 2020 election, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin turned blue again. But there were also two surprise states that turned blue that year: Georgia (reliably red for years, except for Jimmy Carter in 1976, and Bill Clinton in 1992) and Arizona (red since 1952).

With these factors in mind, for the 2024 version of this simulation, I chose the following as the