Donald Trump, who is seeking re-election, won the 2016 presidential election by overturning the states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, three strongholds of the "blue wall", the color of the Democrats, who thought so acquired to their cause.

This tour de force allowed him to win the majority that matters, that is to say that of the "electoral college", even though his rival Hillary Clinton had collected more votes than him at the national level.

This victory can be explained by the “winner takes all” rule which applies in 48 of the 50 states, including Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

Thus, of the 120 million votes counted in 2016, 100,000 of them decided on the outcome of the election.

Focus on five of the key states at stake in the 2020 White House race.  

  • Pennsylvania

Democratic candidate Joe Biden's home state of Pennsylvania is the largest of the three former "Blue Wall" states.

The cities of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh traditionally tend to vote Democratic in large proportions, while rural areas lean heavily toward Republicans.

Historically, Democrats have tended to outstrip the GOP (Great Old Party, the official name of the Republican Party) among white working-class voters in the state.

However, in his landslide victory in the 1984 presidential election, Republican Ronald Reagan won a large number of votes from those voters - dubbed the "Reagan Democrats", especially those who live in rural areas.

His successor from the same side, George HW Bush, also succeeded in seducing this fringe of voters four years later.

But from the victory of Bill Clinton in 1992 to the re-election of Barack Obama in 2012, the Democrats nevertheless managed to win enough votes within the white working class to keep Pennsylvania in their pockets thanks to the "winner takes rule". all ".

The situation changed during the 2016 elections. Donald Trump largely won in rural and conservative areas, with record numbers.

He has also shifted predominantly white and traditionally democratic working-class areas to his camp - like the counties of Erie and Lucerne, two post-industrial areas in this key Rust Belt state.

If the latest polls are to be believed, this time the cards are likely to be reshuffled again.

Joe Biden is 4 points ahead in Pennsylvania, according to an aggregate poll released Sunday by RealClearPolitics.

The numbers in the Philadelphia suburbs - the type of territories inhabited by upper-middle-class voters that had been decisive for Ronald Reagan - look particularly bad for Donald Trump.

Indeed, an NBC / Marist poll conducted in September showed Joe Biden to be in the lead with a massive 28-point lead.

However, there is some evidence that after wrongly predicting a Hillary Clinton victory in 2016, such polls could be misleading.

When voters in Pennsylvania were asked who would win the state in a poll in Monmouth in July, Donald Trump came out on top by a point ahead.

In the same poll, 57% said they believed there were “secret” voters for the Republican billionaire in the region.

The campaign program of the two candidates, in the home stretch before the election, shows how crucial they consider this state to be.

Donald Trump has organized four rallies in Pennsylvania on Saturday and will return to them on Monday, the last day of the campaign.

For his part, Joe Biden visited Philadelphia on Sunday.

The former vice president's campaign team said he and his running mate Kamala Harris will be crisscrossing "all corners" of the state on Monday.

Joe Biden will then campaign in key Pennsylvania state on election day.

  • Michigan

Michigan's electoral pattern largely resembles that of Pennsylvania: many voters who leaned in favor of Ronald Reagan in 1984 switched back to the Democrats, who then systematically won the state in every presidential election between 1992 and 2012, until Donald Trump won in 2016.

Here too, the polls predict that Joe Biden will again tint this state blue.

According to calculations by RealClearPolitics, he is 7 points ahead of the Republican president.

He seems to be more in line with the Michigan Democratic base than Hillary Clinton was in 2016. During the primaries, last March, Joe Biden beat Bernie Sanders there, while the senator from Vermont, very marked on the left, himself beaten Hillary Clinton in 2016. An EPIC-MRA poll conducted in June put Joe Biden up to 16 points ahead of Donald Trump.

However, Michigan Democratic Representative Debbie Dingell - who warned Hilllary Clinton's campaign team that she would be in trouble in 2016 - told The Atlantic that the latest poll was "bullshit." .

She said she "saw a lot of signs in favor of Donald Trump."

However, Debbie Dingell also said that Joe Biden was in better shape than Hillary Clinton "because Joe is closer to the workers," noting that "a lot of people took to heart the candidate's use of the word 'deplorable' to label Trump supporters and felt she was "looking down on them."

As in Pennsylvania, the two calendars of the 2020 campaign have demonstrated the importance of this "swing state".

Joe Biden held a rally there on Saturday, flanked by former President Barack Obama.

Donald Trump, meanwhile, organized a "Make America Great Again Victory Rally" in Michigan on Friday.

Joe Biden's wife Jill Biden and Donald Trump's children Eric and Tiffany all campaigned there on Thursday.

  • Wisconsin

In 2016, Donald Trump became the first Republican candidate to beat his Democratic rival in Wisconsin since 1984. Here too, the key to victory lay in the hands of white working-class voters who shifted from the Democratic camp to the Republicans. .

Like the whole of the United States, the Republican Party's base is concentrated in rural Wisconsin, while Democratic strongholds are in urban areas, notably in the state's largest city, Milwaukee. , and the capital and university center, Madison.

According to polls, voters in the affluent suburbs that surround major American cities seem to want to get rid of Donald Trump.

But some of them suggest the Milwaukee suburbs might be an exception, a Marquette Law School poll released in early September placing the incumbent president 10 points ahead of his competitor. 

In 2016, Donald Trump had come five times to campaign in Wisconsin after his party conventions.

For her part, Hillary Clinton, who had not campaigned in that state during the same period, later explained that her team had been "taken by surprise" in that state.

Overall, RealClearPolitics' calculations give Joe Biden a 6-point lead in Wisconsin.

The two candidates campaigned there on Friday, knowing that both had already been there several times this year.

  • Georgia

Since Bill Clinton in 1992, no Democratic candidate has ever won Georgia in a presidential election again.

But the unchallenged GOP dominance in that state has cracked since a Democratic candidate, Lucy McBath, narrowly managed to tip Georgia's 6th constituency, in the 2018 midterm elections, and walked away. get elected to the House of Representatives.

Largely made up of the leafy suburbs of Atlanta, this constituency, however deemed impregnable, is the former baston of Republican tenor Newt Gingrich, former speaker of the House of Representatives.

For his part, Republican Brian Kemp came in first with just 55,000 votes in the hotly contested governor election in 2018. Critics, including his Democratic opponent Stacey Abrams, denounced the outright erasure of a large number of voters from the electoral rolls.

According to data analyzed by The Economist, "the number of voters possibly deprived of their right to vote was close to 50,000".

Either way, this tight result demonstrated the retreat of the GOP's grip on Georgia.

It must be said that the number of young voters and from minorities has increased there over the past decade.

"The demographics are against us," incumbent Republican Senator David Perdue told a group of his party activists in April.

Joe Biden is just 0.8 points ahead of Donald Trump in Georgia, according to the RealClearPolitics poll average.

The Democratic candidate visited the state on Tuesday for a speech in Warm Springs, a small town with therapeutic waters much appreciated by the late President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, while Donald Trump hosted a rally there on Sunday.

  • Florida 

The third most populous American state in the country, Florida has always been won by the winner of the US presidential election since 1996. But this peculiarity, which makes it a highly observed indicator, has drawn the attention of the the whole world on the occasion of the 2000 election. The final result of the vote was played out around the 25 votes (today 29) of the electoral college of the State, which tilted on the side of George W. Bush , after a legal imbroglio around the recount of the votes, finally settled by a decision of the Supreme Court.

Florida's population has experienced a boom in recent decades thanks to the influx of retirees, largely white, and mostly Latin American immigrants.

About two-thirds of white voters in Florida said in 2016, in Associated Press exit polls, that they voted in favor of Donald Trump.

The latter also performed well with the state's large Cuban-American population, largely from exiles who fled the communist regime of Fidel Castro, which granted him 54% of its votes.

For her part, Hillary Clinton won 71% of the vote among Latino voters.

The RealClearPolitics poll average indicates that Joe Biden leads by 1.2 points in that state, but some polls suggest that support for the two candidates is shifting.

While Florida retirees played an important role in Donald Trump's victory in 2016, a Quinnipiac poll, conducted in early October, put Joe Biden 15 points ahead of residents over 65.

Late last month, a poll for Telemundo placed the Democrat and his rival at 48% and 43% respectively, after polling a panel of the state's heterogeneous Latino population.

By comparison, Hillary Clinton won 62% of the Hispanic votes in Florida in 2016.

"If Biden is to tip Florida he has to at least match Clinton's numbers among Hispanics and it looks like that won't happen," Brad Coker, a Mason-Dixon Polling and Strategy pollster, told Politico, the firm that organized the survey.

There, Donald Trump and Joe Biden both held rallies in Tampa on Friday.   

To find the article in its original version "The five key states that could decide the US presidential election", click here.

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