The motivation for this work is examine federal election competitiveness over time at both the national and state level. At the national level we seek a means to quantify competitiveness in a way that allows comparison between presidential elections and majority control of Congress. At the state level we seek to examine vote importance for presidential electoral votes and congressional Senate and House seats.Our approach for measuring the competitiveness of elections at the national level is based on the number of needed votes to overcome the outcome of an election. At the state level, we study the importance of a vote as to how much it "counts" by focusing on whether there is already a strong preference for one party or another by voters of a state.The needed votes metric has been reported for presidential elections, particularly when the election is a close one, but is appealing because it can be similarly applied for majority control of the Senate and House. Using the median number of needed votes to overturn the election as our measure we observe a notable change in the competitiveness of federal elections since 2000. We observe the competitiveness of presidential elections has increased by 92% from before and since that year. Similarly, the competitiveness for majority control of each house of Congress has increased by 39% for the Senate and 74% for the House since 2000.Using the vote importance metric for competitiveness of elections within each state for presidential elections since 1976 shows that Nevada, Wisconsin and North Carolina have the largest median vote importance and are the most competitive. In contrast, Massachusetts consistently has had the smallest median vote importance for presidential elections during this time followed by the District of Columbia and Utah.We also compute the vote importance value for each state in congressional elections since 1976. Nevada, followed by Delaware, New Hampshire and Montana have the highest median vote importance values for Senate races during this time. Similarly, New Hampshire followed by Iowa, Nevada and Montana have had the most competitive House races.Beyond examination of vote importance in individual states we also examine it across all states over time. The results show that the median vote importance for presidential elections decreased by 48% from before until since the year 2000. Similarly, the median vote importance for Senate elections decreased by 31% and for House elections by 24%. These results for state competitiveness are in striking contrast to those for election competitiveness, which increased between these two time periods. The conclusion to be drawn from these contrasting results is that while control for the White House and Congress has become more competitive, the federal elections within each state have become less so. A fewer number of states and districts are making the difference in increasingly competitive federal elections.We also make use of a straightforward combination of presidential, Senate and House voting influence for the contribution of each state to federal elections. We combine this contribution of each state with its vote importance to compute the impact of each state for federal elections since 1976.We find there are states that have exhibited consistency in their voting impact both over the entire time as well as specific timeframes. The states that most consistently rank in the top five for voting impact are California, Wisconsin and Nevada. The vote importance in California is relatively low, but with the highest contribution to federal elections its composite impact is consistently high. Nevada's impact is high because its composite vote importance is the highest over the period of our study while Wisconsin has relatively high vote importance and a moderate amount of state importance.Not surprising, the District of Columbia has the lowest impact because not only is its contribution the lowest, but its vote importance is relatively low. Among states, Louisiana and Massachusetts most often are in the bottom five for impact among all states. In each case, these states have a moderate amount of state contribution, but their vote importance is the lowest of all states over the 50 years of our study
