Outside the Beltway

Electoral College Insanity: Florida Edition

Trump is significantly outpeforming his 2020 results in New York and Florida. It doesn't matter.

James Joyner · Friday, October 11, 2024 · 2 comments

A couple-day-old report by Nate Cohn, “A Florida Poll That Should Change the Way You Look at the Election,” is yet another data point in how strange our method of electing Presidents is. The first several paragraphs highlight that the latest NYT/Sienna poll shows Donald Trump with a staggering 13-point lead in his now-home state of Florida and argues that, despite this being wildly different from what other polls are showing, we should believe it.

That, really, is neither here nor there. We’ll know in a month, after all. But here’s the thing that matters:

In a key respect, a big lead for Mr. Trump in Florida doesn’t affect the presidential election much. The state had already drifted off most analysts’ lists of core battleground states; Florida voted for Mr. Trump by more than three percentage points in 2020. And in the winner-take-all Electoral College, it doesn’t matter if you win Florida by four points or 13 points — either way, you get all the state’s 30 electoral votes.

Intellectually, of course, we all know this. With the minimal exceptions of Maine and Nebraska, all the states and the District of Columbia award their entire Electoral slate to the popular vote winner in that state, regardless of margin. That Trump is doing considerably better in Florida (which, those of us of a certain age will recall was the crucial state in determining the 2000 election and thus the swingiest of the swing states) than the last two cycles is completely irrelevant to the outcome of the election. And that makes no sense whatsoever in a rational system.

Interestingly, this is not the point Cohn came to make. Rather, he’s seeing further signs of a re-alignment or at least yet more sorting on cultural lines.

If Florida becomes more solidly Republican in 2024, it suggests that the upheaval during and after the pandemic has had a lasting effect on American politics.

This poll, after all, is far from the first indication of Republican strength in the Sunshine State. Republicans won a landslide victory here in the 2022 midterms, as the state was ground zero for the conservative reaction against lockdowns, vaccine mandates and “woke.”

These same issues didn’t do nearly as much to help Republicans elsewhere in the country. In fact, there were other states — like Michigan, Kansas and Pennsylvania — where the backlash against Mr. Trump’s stop-the-steal campaign and the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade seemed to outweigh them and propelled decisive Democratic victories.

Which makes sense on one level—Ron Desantis is Florida’s governor after all—but shows the impermanence of the blueness or redness of a given state. Both the ideological tenor of the parties and the demographics of the states change over time. And what appeals to “undecided” voters in the South is going to be different than what appeals to their counterparts in the Rust Belt.

In the short term, though, this means our weirdly undemocratic system is becoming more democratic in practice.

Importantly, the pattern is consistent with the idea that Mr. Trump’s edge in the Electoral College relative to the popular vote has shrunk somewhat since 2020.

A 10-point gain for Mr. Trump in Florida and New York — where Siena College also shows enduring Republican strength, though the state remains safely Democratic — would be enough to shave about one (inefficient) point off Vice President Harris’s lead in the popular vote.

While true in the aggregate, it’s ass-backward in the particular. If it turns out to be true that Trump has gained 10 percentage points in popularity in New York over the last four years, the takeaway isn’t that this will lessen the distortion caused by the Electoral College but rather the opposite. In 2020, 61% of New Yorkers voted for Biden while 38% voted for Trump, so the distortion was that 38%. If, in 2024, it’s 51% Harris, 48% Trump, it would be a distortion of 48%.

We’re talking here about the third (Florida) and fourth (New York) most populous states in the union, combining for 12.5% of the entire US population. That the votes that don’t count in the two largely cancel out is a matter of happenstance, not design.