The U.S. has a unique system for electing a president, the Electoral College. In modern times, it has put disproportionate voting power in the hands of a few states that are fairly evenly divided politically.
That forces campaigns to dedicate most of their money to the so-called battleground states. There are seven of them this year — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
The lack of attention to other states leaves voters in much of the country feeling as if they and the issues they care about are being overlooked during the presidential contest.
American voters don't choose their president directly through the popular vote. When they cast their ballot, they are technically voting for a slate of electors who will then vote for president and vice president on a specific day in December.
Nearly all states have laws binding electors to vote for the winner of their state’s popular vote, but that doesn't mean the presidential candidate who gets the most Electoral College votes is the one favored by the majority of voters.
In two of the last six U.S. presidential elections, candidates have lost the nationwide popular vote but won the presidency. This includes former President Donald Trump, who lost the popular vote to Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016 by nearly 2.9 million but still won enough votes in the Electoral College to become president.
This often sounds crazy to people who live in democracies in the rest of the world. The U.S. is the only country to have a system where voters select a body of electors with the sole function of choosing the president. In most other democracies, the president is directly elected through the popular will of the voters.
Each state's presidential electors are equal to the number of its representatives in the U.S. House and Senate. This benefits smaller states and sets the stage for presidential elections to largely hinge on just a handful of swing states.
A presidential candidate must win a majority of the 538 total electoral votes to win (the District of Columbia gets three). Most states use a winner-take-all system in which all electors award their votes to the popular winner in the state. Maine and Nebraska are the exceptions, awarding theirs on a proportional basis.
The Electoral College incentivizes presidential campaigns to focus visits and spending on a small number of swing states.
This year’s presidential battleground states represent 18% of the country’s population but have dominated the attention of the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates and their running mates.
Through Tuesday, the Democratic and Republican tickets have had just over 200 total campaign stops — three-quarters of which have been to the seven battleground states, according to a database of campaign events that is based on Associated Press reporting. Pennsylvania alone has been visited 41 times, the most of any state. The AP data shows Michigan is second, with 31 visits through Tuesday, followed closely by Wisconsin, with 27. The rest: North Carolina, 18; Nevada, 13; and Arizona and Georgia with 12 visits each.
But it’s not just the state visits: The presidential campaigns are tailoring their appearances to specific counties they believe are crucial to their success. The AP’s database shows their campaign events in those seven states have been concentrated in counties with 22.7 million registered voters — just 10% of all voters registered nationally for this year’s presidential election.
The lack of attention from presidential candidates is felt acutely in places like Waukegan, Illinois, a majority Latino working-class city that has struggled as its factories closed and waterfront deteriorated. Except for the occasional fundraiser in Chicago, Illinois is mostly bypassed by presidential candidates because it votes reliably Democratic.
Its neighbor to the north, Wisconsin, is a common stomping ground for presidential hopefuls.
The last time a presidential candidate set foot in Waukegan was when former President Donald Trump landed at its airport in 2020. He walked off Air Force One, gave a single wave, and immediately climbed into an SUV headed across the border to Kenosha, Wisconsin.
But in Racine, a Wisconsin city of a similar size just 50 miles north of Waukegan, Trump hosted a rally in June near a harbor overlooking Lake Michigan, where he gushed about the development along the lakeshore, spoke about revitalization efforts in Racine and the Milwaukee metropolitan area, and emphasized their voters’ importance in his attempt to return to the White House. Just a month earlier, before he dropped out of the race, President Joe Biden lauded a new Microsoft center in Racine County during a campaign stop in the city.
Waukegan residents say they feel lost in the national conversation during presidential elections and wish they could also be on the candidates’ radar.
“It’s not so much the candidates as it is the anti-democratic Electoral College,” said Matt Muchowkshi, chair of the Waukegan Township Democrats. "It’s frustrating that certain voters’ votes count for more, and they discount and discredit the votes of more urban, more people of color voters.”
Associated Press multimedia journalist Kevin S. Vineys in Washington contributed to this report.
The Associated Press receives support from several private foundations to enhance its explanatory coverage of elections and democracy. See more about AP’s democracy initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
A "For Sale" sign is displayed outside of a restaurant in Waukegan, Ill., Saturday, Sept. 28, 2024. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh)
Matt Muchowkshi, chair of the Waukegan Township Democrats, looks around at the Waukegan Township Democrats office in Waukegan, Ill., Monday, Sept. 16, 2024. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh)
Pedestrians walk past the Waukegan Township Democrats office in Waukegan, Ill., Monday, Sept. 16, 2024. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh)
A person walks past a ballot drop-box for Lake County in downtown Waukegan in Waukegan, Ill., Monday, Sept. 16, 2024. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh)
BERLIN (AP) — Like many other young women living in communist East Germany, Solveig Leo thought nothing about juggling work and motherhood. The mother of two was able to preside over a large state-owned farm in the northeastern village of Banzkow because childcare was widely available.
Contrast that with Claudia Huth, a mother of five, who grew up in capitalist West Germany. Huth quit her job as a bank clerk when she was pregnant with her first child and led a life as a traditional housewife in the village of Egelsbach in Hesse, raising the kids and tending to her husband, who worked as a chemist.
Both Leo and Huth fulfilled roles that in many ways were typical for women in the vastly different political systems that governed Germany during its decades of division following the country’s defeat in World War II in 1945.
As Germany celebrates the 35th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall on Nov. 9, 1989 — and the country’s reunification less than a year later on Oct. 3, 1990 — many in Germany are reflecting on how women’s lives that have diverged so starkly under communism and capitalism have become much more similar again — though some differences remain even today.
“In West Germany, women — not all, but many — had to fight for their right to have a career,” said Clara Marz, the curator of an exhibition about women in divided Germany for the Federal Foundation for the Study of the Communist Dictatorship in Germany.
Women in East Germany, meanwhile, often had jobs — though that was something that “they had been ordered from above to do,” she added.
Built in 1961, the Wall stood for 28 years at the front line of the Cold War between the Americans and the Soviets. It was built by the communist regime to cut off East Germans from the supposed ideological contamination of the West and to stem the tide of people fleeing East Germany.
Today only a few stretches of the 156.4-kilometer (97.2-mile) barrier around the capitalist exclave of West Berlin remain, mostly as a tourist attraction.
“All the heavy industry was in the west, there was nothing here,” Leo, who is now 81 years old, said during a recent interview looking back at her life as a woman under communism. “East Germany had to pay war reparations to the Soviet Union. Women needed to work our own way out of that misery.”
By contrast, Leo said, women in the West didn't need to work because they were “spoiled by the Marshall Plan” — the United States’ generous reconstruction plan that poured billions of dollars into West Germany and other European countries after the war.
In capitalist West Germany, the economy recovered so quickly after the total devastation of WWII that people soon started talking of a Wirtschaftswunder, or “economic miracle,” that brought them affluence and stability less than 10 years after the war.
That economic success, however, indirectly hampered women’s quest for equal rights. Most West German women stayed at home and were expected to take care of their household while their husbands worked. Religion, too, played a much bigger role than in atheist East Germany, confining women to traditional roles as caregivers of the family.
Mothers who tried to break out of these conventions and took on jobs were infamously decried as Rabenmütter, or uncaring moms who put work over family.
Not all West German women perceived their traditional roles as restrictive.
“I always had this idea to be with my children, because I loved being with them," said Huth, now 69. “It never really occurred to me to go to work.”
More than three decades after Germany’s unification, a new generation of women is barely aware of the different lives their mothers and grandmothers led depending on which part of the country they lived in. For most, combining work and motherhood has also become the normal way of life.
Hannah Fiedler, an 18-year-old high school graduate from Berlin, said the fact that her family lived in East Germany during the decades of the country's division has no impact on her life today.
“East or West — it's not even a topic in our family anymore,” she said, as she sat on a bench near a thin, cobble-stoned path in the capital's Mitte neighborhood, which marks the former course of the Berlin Wall in the then-divided city.
She also said that growing up, she had not experienced any disadvantages because she's female.
“I'm white and privileged — for good or worse — I don't expect any problems when I enter the working world in the future,” she said.
Some small differences between the formerly divided parts of Germany linger on. In the former East, 74% of women are working, compared to 71.5% in the West, according to a 2023 study by the Hans-Böckler-Stiftung foundation.
Childcare is also still more available in the former East than in the West.
In 2018, 57% of children under the age of 3 were looked after in a childcare facility in the eastern state of Saxony. That compares with 27% in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia and 44% in Hamburg and Bremen, according to Germany's Federal Statistical Office.
Germany as a whole trails behind some other European countries when it comes to gender equality.
Only 31.4% lawmakers in Germany's national parliament are female, compared to 41% in Belgium's parliament, 43.6% in Denmark, 45% in Norway and 45.6% in Sweden.
Nonetheless, Leo, the 81-year-old farmer from former East Germany, is optimistic that eventually women all over the country will have the same opportunities.
“I can’t imagine that there are any women who don’t like to be independent,” she said.
Jan M. Olsen contributed from Copenhagen.
Seamstresses work th the VEB clothing factory "Fortschritt",1987 in Berlin. (Zentralbild/DPA via AP)
Women work in the former East German Landwirtschaftliche Produktionsgenossenschaft (LPG) an 'Agricultural Production Cooperative' in Golzow on April 13, 1981. (Heinrich Sanden/DPA via AP)
Mealtime at the kindergarten on Wieckerstrasse in the Berlin district of Hohenschönhausen, in November 1987. (Zentralbid/DPA via AP)
Clara Marz an Organizer of an exhibition about women works on the photos in her office in Berlin, Germany, Thursday, Oct. 17, 2024. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)
Clara Marz an Organizer of an exhibition about women attends an interview with the Associated Press in her office in Berlin, Germany, Thursday, Oct. 17, 2024. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)
Solveig Leo, 81, former head of a large state-owned farm shows an old photo of herself from her youth during her interview with the Associated Press in the northeastern village of Banzkow, Germany, Monday, Oct. 28, 2024. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)
Solveig Leo, 81, former head of a large state-owned farm attends an interview with the Associated Press in the northeastern village of Banzkow, Germany, Monday, Oct. 28, 2024. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)
Solveig Leo, 81, former head of a large state-owned farm feeds her horse after the interview with the Associated Press in the northeastern village of Banzkow, Germany, Monday, Oct. 28, 2024. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)
Solveig Leo, 81, former head of a large state-owned farm looks at her old photos album during her interview with the Associated Press in the northeastern village of Banzkow, Germany, Monday, Oct. 28, 2024. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)
Claudia Huth walks in front of her house in Egelsbach, Germany, Thursday, Oct. 31, 2024. (AP Photo/Michael Probst)
Claudia Huth shows old photos of her children and herself in her house in Egelsbach, Germany, Thursday, Oct. 31, 2024. (AP Photo/Michael Probst)
A repro of a photo pictured in Egelsbach, Germany, Thursday, Oct. 31, 2024 shows Claudia Huth and her children. (AP Photo/Michael Probst)
Claudia Huth poses next to a painting showing herself and painted by her son in her house in Egelsbach, Germany, Thursday, Oct. 31, 2024. (AP Photo/Michael Probst)
Claudia Huth shows an old photo of her family and herself in her house in Egelsbach, Germany, Thursday, Oct. 31, 2024. (AP Photo/Michael Probst)
Repro of a photo pictured in Egelsbach, Germany, Thursday, Oct. 31, 2024 shows Claudia Huth and her children. (AP Photo/Michael Probst)
Claudia Huth poses next to a painting showing herself and painted by her son in her house in Egelsbach, Germany, Thursday, Oct. 31, 2024. (AP Photo/Michael Probst)