Tipping-point state
In United States presidential elections, the tipping-point state is the closest state that gives the winning candidate 270 or more electoral votes, thereby securing his or her victory in the Electoral College, when all states are arranged in order of their vote margins. Equivalently, if the tipping-point state and all states with a smaller vote margin were transferred from the winner to the second-place finisher, the outcome of the election would be reversed.
In elections where at least three individuals receive electoral votes, there can be more than one tipping point state. Tipping point states may also differ depending on the disposition of faithless electors, on the assumption that certain faithless electors may have chosen to give their vote to the candidate they had pledged to vote for if their vote would have given that candidate a majority of the vote.
The concept of a tipping point state was first popularized by FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver. FiveThirtyEight regularly predicts which state will be the tipping-point state in a given presidential election through his site's "Tipping Point Index". Past predictions of tipping-point states include either Michigan or Ohio in the 2008 election,
Ohio in the 2012 election, and Florida in the 2016 election.Past tipping-point states
