Tipping Point State COVID Cases
What does COVID look like in the state that will determine the Electoral College winner of the 2020 presidential election? To find out, I first downloaded the historical case data from Covid Act Now.
This first figure shows the absolute number of cases for all 50 states plus the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands.
The next figure depicts the cases per 100,000 population of the average state.1 Note that this is not the cases per 100,000 for the United States as a whole, but the expected cases per 100,000 if you picked a random state out of a hat.
Next, I copied data from FiveThirtyEight about the probability that a particular state would be the tipping point state. The tipping point state is the state that pushes the victor past 270 Electoral College votes if you count states won by each candidate in order of their vote margin, from greatest to least.2 The table below includes all tipping point states for which FiveThirtyEight expects a 1.0% probability or greater of being the actual tipping point state for the 2020 election.
| State | Tip_Probability |
|---|---|
| PA | 36.5% |
| FL | 14.3% |
| MI | 7.7% |
| WI | 5.3% |
| NC | 5.2% |
| GA | 4.2% |
| NV | 3.4% |
| MN | 3.1% |
| TX | 2.4% |
| OH | 1.8% |
| CO | 1.5% |
| NM | 1.2% |
| NH | 1.1% |
As you can see, there is a 87.7% probability that one of these states is the actual tipping point state.
Now, what do COVID cases look like in these particular states?
Now, to calculate COVID cases for the expected tipping point state, we will weight each of our states by its probability of being the tipping point state. For those concerned about voting in person in “swing” states, I’ll note that this year’s swing state will likely exhibit “high risk”3 for daily new cases. Even worse, it could be the time when tipping point state residents experience their worst COVID case numbers ever!
Technically, “The number of [daily] cases per 100k population calculated using a 7-day rolling average.” https://apidocs.covidactnow.org/api#tag/State-Data/paths/~1states.timeseries.json?apiKey={apiKey}/get↩
You can imagine building a tower in which each state is represented by a number of floors equal to that state’s Electoral College votes, e.g., 29 floors for NY and 38 floors for Texas. For candidate A, the base of their tower will be the state they won and won by the greatest margin, then the state they won by the second greatest margin. Do the same for all candidates and find the one state located on floor 270—that is your tipping point state.↩
Covid Act Now defines “high risk” at greater than or equal to 10 per 100,000 residents and “critical risk” at greater than or equal to 25 per 100,000 residents.↩
Joseph de la Torre Dwyer
Researcher
My research interests include distributive justice; the principles of responsibility, desert, and control; and reproducible research with R.