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In a recent blog post, I noted that lobbyists for the National Popular Vote interstate compact (NPV) routinely but inaccurately claim that disaster declarations by the president are distorted by the Electoral College and that “battleground states” are twice as likely as other states to get a disaster declaration. 

I wrote about this a few years back, showing that for the period from 2001 thru 2020 the states most likely to receive a presidential disaster declaration (and the accompanying federal funds) were not battlegrounds but instead “safe states” like Oklahoma, Mississippi, California, and New York. Recently I went back and updated the analysis, expanding the time period covered to January 1997 thru June of 2025. The findings were largely identical. 

Specifically, the ten states with the most presidential disaster declarations over this time period were: Oklahoma (62), Tennessee (56), California (54), Florida (51), Kentucky (51), New York (50), Missouri (48), Kansas (48), Mississippi (47) and Alabama (46). Only two of those ten, Florida and Missouri, have been battlegrounds more than once in the past seven presidential elections; most were never a battleground in that period. Meanwhile the four most frequent battleground states over the same period (at least six of the last seven presidential elections) have had fewer disaster declarations than the national average of 33.5: Ohio (26); Pennsylvania (25); Wisconsin (24); and Michigan (15).

This data is publicly available at the Federal Emergency Management Agency website, and it’s fairly easy to count the number of disaster declarations in each state for any given time period. With any luck the next time one of NPV’s lobbyists offers this easily-debunked talking point in public, there will be someone who can challenge them with the facts.