Selects: What's the deal with swing states?

Charles "Chuck" W. Bryant (0:00)

Hi, everybody, it's Chuck, and I'm rolling through the year of COVID. This is October 6, 2020, and it's got to be election season, because we're talking about swing states.

And it's October before the election in November. What's the Deal with Swing States is the title of this episode. And I know we did a few episodes that were slightly political leading up to the election. And this is one of them, and it was a good one. Swing states are weird to me, but I think we get to the bottom of it. Check it out right now.

SPEAKER_2 (0:36)

Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio.

Josh Clark (0:45)

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryan over there, and Jerry's over there somewhere, I think in our office. And this is Stuff You Should Know, the Swingin Super Hip Cat Edition.

Charles "Chuck" W. Bryant (1:01)

Swing states.

Josh Clark (1:03)

They're the swingin estates of all.

Charles "Chuck" W. Bryant (1:06)

They like to sleep with each other.

Josh Clark (1:10)

Based on keys they took out of a fish ball.

Charles "Chuck" W. Bryant (1:14)

I should say up front, thank you to howstuffworks.com for this article along with Politico, NPR, and I think 538blog I got some stuff from.

Josh Clark (1:24)

You sound like you're giving an acceptance speech.

Charles "Chuck" W. Bryant (1:27)

Yeah, for best election podcast episode.

Josh Clark (1:31)

That's right. We are not going to win.

Charles "Chuck" W. Bryant (1:34)

Yeah, so this is on swing estates, which are all the rage, battleground estates these days.

Josh Clark (1:41)

Everybody loves them.

Charles "Chuck" W. Bryant (1:42)

And have been for a while, but some of this stuff I thought even enlightened me, and I thought I kind of knew most of this stuff.

Josh Clark (1:50)

Yeah, it's one of those things that I found that you can make a lot more difficult than it actually is, at least just the general concept of swing estates. But there's a lot of detail and info and history to it that makes the whole thing really interesting.

So to keep from making the whole thing more difficult than it is, let's just define swing estates at the outset.

Charles "Chuck" W. Bryant (2:14)

Okay, go ahead.

Josh Clark (2:15)

Swing estates are states during presidential elections in the United States here, that are so closely divided politically that they could go either way.

They could vote one way or the other. And based on a lot of governmental ins and outs that will go over, depending on which way they flip, they could make or break a presidential campaign and elect the president or deny somebody else the presidency. At the same time even, they can do both.

Charles "Chuck" W. Bryant (2:49)

That's right. And I'm glad you said that, because more than anything else in this episode, we want to drive, or I want to drive home at least, I'm sure you're on board.

A swing state is not just a state that is very closely divided politically among its constituents, and it just could go one way or the other. It is a state where there are people who, there are enough people in that state who can be persuaded to change who they vote for, that it can make a state go one way or the other. We're talking down to the thousands or even hundreds of votes, and that is why it is so, so, so, so important that everybody votes, everybody votes, but especially if you live in one of these swing states, because there are, believe it or not, there are people that still haven't made up their mind in this country.

Josh Clark (3:43)

Which is really surprising in this particular election, because things have gotten super partisan and polarized in America, and they had been going that way for many, many years now, but I mean, it is, I don't want to say it's reached its apex. I hope it's reached its apex. I'm sure it could get way worse, but things are real polarized here. So it is very surprising that there's undecided voters. And I remember from our election polling episode, we were saying one of the reasons that the state polling was so far off is because there were so many undecided voters at the end of 2016

That in and of itself is pretty surprising because the candidates were so different, things were so polarized then. It's even more surprising now that there's any undecided voters.

Charles "Chuck" W. Bryant (4:25)

But they're out there. There's not a ton of them, but there's enough of them to swing an election and swing a state.