Everything You Need to Know About the Swing States But Didn't Care to Ask

The process of electing a president can be baffling. It takes what feels like forever and brings along with it jargon that you only hear every four years. Here’s a term you’ve probably heard tossed around this year: “swing states." Every election year, candidates and pundits make a huge fuss over these states, and for good reason; they need them to win.

The race to the White House is dictated by swing states—also known as “battleground states” or “purple states”—where the popular vote is projected to be split near evenly between both major political parties.

Based on public polls from all of the states, the following 11 states are considered swing states this year: Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin. Altogether, those 11 states will produce 146 electoral votes—more than half of the electoral votes needed to win the presidency. They're also home to a huge number of young voters and voters of color. To be more specific, of the eligible voter in these states, more than 5.6 million are under 30 years old and more than 1.7 million are black or Latino, according to the U.S. Census.

These so-called Obama voters are exactly who some Republican lawmakers don’t want to vote. In fact, six of the swing states—New Hampshire, Ohio, Florida, Virginia, Iowa, and Wisconsin—enacted that make it harder to vote after Obama was elected, and four of those states will have laws in place for the first time in the upcoming election.

Complex reached out to young voters in some of the swing states to get their thoughts on the upcoming election. Here’s what they had to say:

Tiffany Tolentino, and Independent Florida says, “A Trump presidency would solidify America's xenophobia and inherent racism, through policy, public opinion or both. As a Hispanic woman, I’m indefinitely part of the thousands of already disenfranchised Americans in this country, I can easily see more and more of my rights being suppressed should Donald Trump become president."

“A Hillary Clinton presidency would continue the same exact practices we see out of Washington D.C. every day that makes most Americans loathe politicians,” says Cole McNeely, a Republican from Michigan. He added that under a Clinton presidency, we would, “see a warped view of the Constitution and an increasingly entitled American populous. The debt would rise and we would be one step closer to a Social Democracy.”

Both Tiffany and Cole are college students, leaders of their respective campuses and plan to vote. If they have their way, their states will swing in the direction of their politics, but we’ll all have to wait until election night to see.