How does VotePair determine which states are swing states and which are safe?

The VotePair team uses several strategies to distinguish swing from safe states. First, we track the swing vs. safe categorizations on four websites: • electoral-vote.com • Los Angeles Times • New York Times • Wall Street Journal Each of these sites track and judge the status of each state using somewhat different criteria. In addition to using these sites' judgements as guides, we also track top media markets where campaigns are spending money when that information is available. (See Two Strategies Outlined in Green.) We also look at average spreads from state polling numbers (from pollingreport.com), and we take into account Professor Sam Wang's statistical analysis.  more