Big State, Small State: The Shifting Nature of Electoral College Strategies.

State electoral votes and state competitiveness are central to most popular and academic conceptualizations of geographic presidential campaign strategy. And yet, the true influence of state size and competitiveness on campaign strategists' decisionmaking remains inadequately understood. This paper explores the influence of these two core components on the strategic campaign classification of the states and campaign resource allocations using archival campaign data. By looking at different strategies over time and reexamining the conditional nature of the variables' relationship, I find the influence of electoral votes and state level competitiveness is not static but varies by campaign and over time. The data reveal a dramatic shift in the relative power of these two independent variables on decisionmaking, as strategists shifted their focus from the big states to those states that are most competitive. Notably, the recent partisan solidification of states like California and Texas does not explain this change. The substantial shift in presidential campaign targeting, from high to lower population states, carries potentially important ramifications for both voters and the nation's issue agenda and offers clues to the recent manifestation of the battleground concept in political discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]