Based on prior research on political business cycles, we investigate the manipulation of state budgets in battleground states. The state-based winner-take-all Electoral College system in the United States makes certain states extremely politicized during presidential elections. We hypothesize that budgets will target specific groups of swing voters in these battleground states. We test the impact of competitive state status in presidential elections on state budgets from 1982 to 2005 by creating a cross-sectional time-series regression model of state budget priorities from Jacoby and Schneider. While controlling for known determinants of budgets, we find strong support for our hypothesis.
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