I can’t tell you how much I hate this. CNN reports that the 2024 Presidential election results will be decided by only a few voters in a few key states, thanks to the stupid, anachronistic, outdated, slavery-based Electoral College system. The Electoral College, which uses statehood and land mass (area) as a proxy for votes. So Democrats will once again win the per-person vote by 3-8 million votes, but that doesn’t matter. Good analysis of Electoral College pros and cons here.

The swing states – those that might go one way or another in 2024 – are:

• Arizona, 11 votes, 7.4 million people
• Nevada, 8 votes, 3.2 million people
• Pennsylvania, 19 votes, 13 million people
• Wisconsin, 10 votes, 6 million people
• Georgia, 16 votes, 11 million people
• North Carolina, 15 votes, 10.7 million people
• Michigan, 15 votes, 10 million people

Just seven states out of 50 are really in play – the other 43, we already know the answer. Or we think we do. By states, that’s 14% of the country. By Electoral College votes, that’s 94/538 = 17.5%. By population, that’s 61.3M/332M = 18.5%. So depending on your metric, somewhere between 14 and 19 percent of the country will decide who our next President is. And some pollsters put the true swing states as only four, in bold above – Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and Wisconsin. What a travesty.

Don’t even try to watch TV in those states during 2024 – you will see nothing but political ads, as both parties spend all their time and money in those states.

I hope (and yes, I know, hope is not a strategy) that one of the larger states surprises us. Maybe the populations of Ohio or Indiana will wake up and realize that the Republican Nihilist party is not their friend. Or even better, Texas. Maybe the women in those states will wake up and all vote against the rush to Gilead. Maybe.

This wouldn’t be quite so frustrating if the choice wasn’t going to be an existential threat. The Republican nominee will be Trump, unless his criminal habits and legal woes take him down. The Democratic nominee will be…who cares, it just doesn’t matter. Literally any human on the planet other than Trump would be my choice (OK, maybe not Marjorie Taylor Greene. She’s just Trump with a longer expected lifespan). But I would gladly vote for George W or Richard Nixon against Trump.

Yeah, the 2024 election year is going to be something.