Campaign visits, per state

[Seperallis]

So after some discussion in the chat about the Electoral College and it's useful/uselessness and arguments for/against (again), I was curious as to exactly where the candidates visited during the election, because the college allegedly "gives the small states a voice" and all the bullshit. So, I wanted to actually know whose voice was being heard, and how often, thanks to our electoral system.

NationalJournal.com has a really neat travel tracker tool that I used to get these numbers. I decided to narrow the results to only the general election campaign (about mid-June through 9th of Nov), ignoring primary contests that'll skew results. Furthermore, I'm only showing results for Hillary & Donald.

For your convenience, let's put the results into a table:

Total # of Visits	States
47	Florida
40	Pennsylvania
34	Ohio
31	North Carolina
16	Colorado (?)
14	New Hampshire
11	Iowa; Michigan; New York City; Virginia
10	Nevada (y tho?)
8	Washington D.C.
6	Wisconsin
5	Arizona (thanks, fear of brown people!)
4	Maine; Texas (the dichotomy is real)
2	Illinois; Indiana; Minnesota; Nebraska
1	California; Connecticut; Georgia; Maryland; Mississippi; Missouri; New Jersey; Washington
0	Alabama; Alaska; Arkansas; Delaware; Hawaii; Idaho; Kansas; Kentucky; Louisiana; Massachusetts; Montana; New Mexico; North Dakota; Oklahoma; Oregon; Rhode Island; South Carolina; South Dakota; Tennessee; Utah; Vermont; West Virginia; Wyoming

I mean, I could make a map of that, but I already spent too much time on my curiosity.

[Nentsia]

Does this confirm my suspicion that in US elections, the people of Florida basically decide what its gonna be?

[Seperallis]

I mean, I guess it could, if you have other data that makes that likely. This is just some random info; on its own, it's really only useful in knowing exactly how important the candidates think the people in any one particular area are.

Whether they are right is another matter entirely.

[Jamzor the Jaxxor]

Candidates visit swing states, generally, and swing states change from election to election.

[Seperallis]

I'm well aware. Candidates only have so much money to spend on their campaigns, and if they're buying ads and traveling and setting up rallies and speeches, that money disappears fast; of course they're going to want to go where their money has the most impact.

I'd like to see a map of past elections to see the changes in where candidates go...but here's an interesting thought experiment: do the visits by candidates make the states contested "swing states," or are they already predetermined to be by whatever powers that be, for whatever reason? One thing I noticed on the map, that isn't shown in the numbers above, is that Trump not only traveled more, but he did so to places that otherwise wouldn't have received any visits whatsoever...all those places that got less than one visit? Most of those were him. That's pretty neat in itself.

But the overarching problem, and the discussion that needs to be had, is that the needs of a few states are still trumping (no pun intended) the needs of all the states at large, the needs of all the nation. The very fact that there are "battleground" states is of course inevitable, it's going to come up no matter what in places candidates think they'll be able to win a greater number of votes or points. This is an obvious problem of the EC, but would it happen under any other system? ...Probably, yes. Most likely it would, just in a different way, but it's something to think about when people go "if we change the EC, it'll just be tyranny of the rural by the urban," all the while our president is currently effectively already determined by only 20 to 40 million people out of 300 million, which is some other kind of "tyranny."

But I'll stop short there, because we've had enough bickering about the system itself in chat already. I'm much more interested in these here numbers above, because I'm looking at the numbers, and I'm seeing... 23 states - nearly half all states - without their voice being heard, and let's be honest here, the vast majority of them are small states with very few electoral votes.