EXTENSIVELY REVISED 05/10/24
In the original version of this post, I argued that Republicans enjoy a slight edge in the Electoral College. The relevant discussion began with this graph:
I continued with this:
A candidate’s share of the electoral doesn’t change in proportion to his share of the nationwide popular vote. (The dashed red line depicts a proportionate relationship.) That is because all of the States (but two) and D.C. have a winner-take-all method of allotting their electoral votes. In those cases, a candidate wins all of the jurisdiction’s electoral votes whether he wins the popular vote by 0.1 percent or 10 percent. And a slight change in the candidate’s popular vote — from 49.9 percent to 50.1 percent, say — swings the entire block of electoral votes.
Look closely at the regression line in the graph and you will see that it doesn’t cross the dashed red line at the 50-50 mark. Rather, a GOP candidate (on average) can win 52.3 percent of the electoral votes with 49.9 percent of the nationwide popular vote. That’s because the smaller States — a majority of which lean GOP — are disproportionately represented in the electoral college. The upshot is that a candidate who wins the most States has an electoral-college advantage.
The next sentence hits upon the real reason for the statistical artifact:
Throw in some close wins in larger States and you have what looks like a resounding victory; for example, in 2016 Trump won 56.9 percent of the electoral votes with 48.9 percent of the two-party popular vote, nationwide.
Republicans won the electoral vote twice in “modern” times (i.e., from 1920 onward) while garnering less than 50 percent of the two-party popular vote:
- The first time was in 2000, when G.W. Bush beat Al Gore solely on the basis of a narrow popular-vote victory in Florida. Florida’s 25 electoral votes gave Bush 1 more than he needed for the win.
- The second time was in 2016, when Trump pulled won Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — each by less than 1 percentage point. The combined 46 electoral votes delivered by those States gave Trump his margin of victory over Clinton.
And that’s it. One need search no further for the reason that a candidate can win the electoral vote with a minority of the two-party popular vote. It could even happen to a Democrat.
In fact, Democrats have won at least three elections since 1920 because of narrow victories in a few States:
- Truman won in 1948 with 49.55 percent of the nationwide tally of popular votes because he won both Ohio and Illinois by less than 1 percentage point. The 53 electoral votes from those States boosted him to victory, even though he lost a big chunk of the “Solid South” (Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina) to Strom Thurmond.
- In 1960, Kennedy’s slight margin in the nationwide popular-vote tally (49.72 percent to Nixon’s 49.55 percent) was mirrored by margins of less than 1 percentage point in Hawaii, Illinois, and Missouri. Their combined 43 electoral votes gave Kennedy the election.
- Biden won in 2020 not because he beat Trump in the meaningless nationwide popular-vote tally by 4.45 percentage points, but because he “won” both Georgia and Wisconsin by less than 1 percentage point and Pennsylvania by a little more than 1 percentage point. The 46 electoral votes thus delivered by those three States gave Biden his margin of victory over Trump in the Electoral College. (Turnabout, in this case, is foul play.)
The statistical relationship in the graph is meaningless. What can be meaningful is a narrow margin of victory (or loss) in a few States. This underlines the lesson from “How Good Are the Presidential Polls?“: Even a large lead in nationwide polls doesn’t signify victory in the Electoral College. Keep your eye on “battleground” States and allow for a lot of uncertainty in the polling results for those States.
Politics and Prosperity 