Republican Electoral College Advantage May Be Shrinking
The skews may offset.
NYT chief political analyst Nate Cohn argues the “Republicans’ Electoral College Edge, Once Seen as Ironclad, Looks to Be Fading.” And, no, this isn’t the Old Gray Lady skewing right to appear “balanced.” It’s just how the numbers are shaking out.
Ever since Donald J. Trump’s stunning victory in 2016 — when he lost the popular vote by almost three million votes but still triumphed with over 300 electoral votes — many who follow politics have believed Republicans hold an intractable advantage in the Electoral College.
But there’s growing evidence to support a surprising possibility: His once formidable advantage in the Electoral College is not as ironclad as many presumed. Instead, it might be shrinking.
This is hardly implausible. After all, states that were solidly red twenty years ago—including my home state of Virginia—have become purple, if not solidly blue. The fact that Georgia voted for Biden and is again up for grabs while North Carolina is now a plausible Harris pickup demonstrates the system’s fluidity.
But Cohn’s analysis is more granular than that: he’s looking at state-by-state margins in polling (or, in past elections, actual voting results) to determine a “tipping point.”
According to The New York Times’s polling average, it does not seem that Kamala Harris will necessarily need to win the popular vote by much to prevail.
The simplest way to measure the advantage in the Electoral College is to take the difference between the national popular vote and the vote in the “tipping-point” state (the state that puts one candidate over the top in the Electoral College). Right now, Vice President Harris leads the polling in the national vote by 2.6 percentage points, and leads Wisconsin — the current tipping-point state — by 1.8 points, which makes Mr. Trump’s advantage less than a point.
By this measure, Mr. Trump’s advantage is only around one-fifth as large as it was four years ago, when he fared 3.8 points better nationally than in Wisconsin (the tipping-point state in 2020).
I’m not sure this is a measurement of EC party lean so much as it is the relative popularity of the candidates. But Cohn sees it this way:
How is it possible?
On the one hand, Ms. Harris is holding her own in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. It’s worth noting this is tenuous: Together, these states help Ms. Harris win the Electoral College, with little room for error. Should the polls meaningfully underestimate Mr. Trump in any one of Michigan, Pennsylvania or Wisconsin, as they did in the last two presidential elections, much of his Electoral College advantage could return.
The second half of the explanation, oddly, is that Mr. Trump is gaining in noncompetitive states like New York, improving his position in the national popular vote without helping him in the most important states. In particular, he appears to be faring best in the states where Republicans excelled in the midterm election two years ago.
Assuming the polling is accurate—a big caveat to be sure—this is interesting. While I tend to think of the EC advantage in terms of which states are essentially “locks” for a given party and how many Electors said states bring, Cohn sees it in terms of how many “wasted” votes the loser got.
So, for example, Texas has voted for the Republican nominee in every presidential election since 1980. Over that time, it has gone from 26 Electoral votes to 40. I see that as a growing Republican advantage because they get 14 more Electors for winning Texas, which they’re almost sure to do again this cycle. (Indeed, Texas alone puts the GOP almost 15% of the way to the magic 270.)
But, from Cohn’s perspective, the Republican advantage is shrinking because Biden got 5,259,126 votes—a mere 631,221 fewer than Trump. While that’s rather odd from a near-term perspective, it could be that Texas is the next California, which went from a reliably Republican state (1952-1960, 1968-1988) to a reliably Democratic state (1992-present) while going from 32 Electors to 55.
Next, Cohn reinforces a point made here many times over the years:
You might be under the impression that Republicans do so well in the Electoral College because of the disproportionate power afforded to small rural states, but that’s not really what’s behind the Electoral College’s skew in the Trump era. Instead, the most distorting feature is that it’s (almost entirely) winner-take-all: You get all of the electoral votes from a state if you win it by a single vote; conversely, you get zero additional electoral votes if you win a state by a lopsided margin.
In 2016, Mr. Trump narrowly prevailed in Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, winning all 75 Electoral College votes from those states, despite winning them by a combined average of less than one percentage point.
Hillary Clinton fared very well in several noncompetitive states; not just big blue states like California, but also a red state like Texas, where she gained seven points compared with Barack Obama. These gains helped her win the popular vote nationally, but they did nothing to help in the Electoral College.
The fact that Wyoming, population 584,057, gets the same two base Electors as California, population 38,965,193, certainly skews the results. That’s dwarfed by the 6,006,518 Trump voters in California whose votes were entirely disregarded in the 2020 election.
Mr. Trump’s declining Electoral College gap today thus reflects some combination of his relative weakness in the core battlegrounds and relative strength in the noncompetitive states.
The core battlegrounds are clear enough: The polls show Ms. Harris leading in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, states that would be enough for her to win the presidency provided she wins the more Democratic-leaning states and districts where she currently leads. On average, Ms. Harris is faring a hair better than President Biden’s election results across these states.
The national polls, on the other hand, show Ms. Harris faring about two points worse than Mr. Biden’s results. Clearly, Mr. Trump is polling better in noncompetitive parts of the country, even as Ms. Harris shows resilience where it counts. Together, it reduces the size of Mr. Trump’s advantage in the Electoral College.
Again, this strikes me more as a measure of Trump’s popularity than the structural advantage of Republican candidates.
The idea of Republicans faring better in the popular vote might seem a little odd, but it actually happened recently: the 2022 midterms.
No, the midterm election didn’t turn out to be a “red wave,” as had been prophesied. Democrats held firm in key battleground states. But a red wave really did materialize in many parts of the country.
Republicans ran far ahead of Mr. Trump’s 2020 performance in New York, Florida and much of the Deep South. They also ran well ahead of Mr. Trump — say, by 5 to 10 points in the House popular vote — in many less competitive states across the South and West, including California and Texas.
As a result, Republicans won the popular vote for U.S. House, even though Democrats were only a few seats away from retaining control of it.
l’m not sure what this has to do with the EC’s skew.
While the evidence is inconclusive, there are signs that Mr. Trump is excelling in many of the places where Republicans won big in the midterms.
One piece of evidence: Times/Siena polling this year. If this year’s national surveys are aggregated together — including the polls when Mr. Biden was the nominee — there’s a clear relationship between Mr. Trump’s gains and how well Republicans fared in the midterms.
I’m not sure what to make of this, to be honest. Presumably, it points to yet more realignment of blue-collar whites and men of all races into Republican voters.
Although there’s less data from the three Times/Siena polls since Ms. Harris became the nominee, they nonetheless show the same pattern: Mr. Trump makes large gains where Republicans posted above-average results in the midterms, but he makes few or no gains elsewhere in the country.
Ideally, individual state polls — not subsamples from national polls — would be the basis for this analysis. Unfortunately, there’s very little state polling outside the battleground states. In New York, there’s plenty of evidence that Ms. Harris is struggling, relatively speaking, but that evidence mostly comes from our partners at Siena College. Their methodology is different from the Times/Siena poll, but not so different that it counts as independent corroboration. On the other hand, Ms. Harris holds up relatively well in most of the Texas, Florida and California polling, so it’s not a straightforward picture.
Admittedly, this is a bit speculative. Polling, at least quality polling, is expensive. And there’s not much incentive to poll in places where the outcome is in doubt. Given that the NYT and Sienna College are based in New York, it’s not shocking that they do poll the Empire State. (Where, incidentally, Harris is “struggling” with a mere 13-point steady lead. In fairness, Clinton got 59% in 2016 and Biden 60.9% in 2020.)
Beyond the public polls, there’s the private polling, fielded by campaigns and other political groups, only a sliver of which is released to the public. I asked Dave Wasserman of the Cook Political Report what he was seeing and hearing lately, especially in the dozen or so potentially competitive races for U.S. House in California and New York. Here’s what he said:
It’s fair to say that in both parties’ polling, Harris is underperforming in New York and California districts (relative to Biden’s 2020 margin) more than in presidential battleground states. My sense is that the political environment in those states might be modestly better for Democrats than it was in the midterms, but that Harris isn’t on track to get Biden-type margins.
Alone, none of this data is conclusive. But together, there are a lot of hints that the 2024 electoral map might look a bit more like 2022 than many would have guessed. If so, it would narrow the gap between the popular vote and the decisive states in the Electoral College.
Which, again, is irrelevant from the standpoint of winning the election. There is simply zero doubt that Harris will win all of California’s 54 Electors and all of New York’s 28. But that’s Cohn’s point: getting all those Electors with thinner margins would be a Democratic skewing, eating away at Republican skewing in Texas and Wyoming.
Of course, from a “democracy” standpoint, skewing is skewing. The fact that the outcome is the same regardless of the voting margin is problematic, not a cause for relief. The fact that the various state-level skews may largely balance themselves out in a given cycle doesn’t mean the design isn’t flawed.
Eight years ago, Mr. Trump’s advantage was built on demographics.
He made huge gains among white voters without a college degree, propelling his breakthrough in the disproportionately white working-class Northern battleground states. Yet at the same time, he alienated millions of highly educated voters, losing a lot of votes in fast-growing and well-educated metropolitan areas, without doing much damage to his chances in the key battlegrounds.
Over the last four years, the demographic foundations of Mr. Trump’s Electoral College advantage have eroded. He’s running ahead of usual Republican benchmarks among Black and Hispanic voters, but they tend to represent a below-average share of the electorate in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — the three battleground states that represent Ms. Harris’s path of least resistance in the current state polling.
But, again, the fact that we have to analyze the election in terms of state-by-state outcomes—and the fact that there is even such a thing as “battleground states”—is a problem. Whether losing college-educated voters changes the outcome in a given state should be irrelevant. All that ought to matter is how many voters in the polity in question—the United States of America—cast a ballot for Candidate A over Candidate B.
Mr. Trump’s gains among Black and Hispanic voters ought to have only a marginal effect on the electoral math. But in the 2022 midterms, one curious pattern was that Republicans made outsize gains among nonwhite voters in noncompetitive states, whether in the Deep South or in the big states like New York or California, even as they made relatively few gains in the battlegrounds, where it counts most.
A similar pattern seems evident in the Times/Siena data amassed over the last year, including in each of Texas, Florida, New York and California — but the samples are too small to represent especially strong evidence. Even so, the possibility that Mr. Trump’s gains among nonwhite voters might be greater in noncompetitive states would start to help make sense of several different electoral trends.
The realignment of voters with the demise of the old GOP and the rise of the MAGA party is interesting. But the institutional design skews the impact of that.
Why did the Republicans do so well in some places, but not others, back in 2022?
At the time, the best explanation seemed to be about the issues at stake. In many key battlegrounds, the Republicans nominated MAGA-backed stop-the-steal candidates and threatened to take away abortion rights. Where they did, Democrats excelled. Elsewhere, the story was often very different. In many blue states, abortion rights were safe and the threat of a stolen election seemed distant, but many voters were concerned by crime, housing shortages and homelessness, resentful of pandemic-era restrictions and frustrated by a perceived failure of Democratic governance. Many conservative and more religious states, meanwhile, weren’t so upset by the end of Roe and remained supportive of Mr. Trump; there, the “red wave” sloshed ashore, unimpeded.
Right. In extremely polities, it’s really, really hard to nominate a candidate bad enough to lose. Unless the candidate is a serial dater of barely-legal girls or, I don’t know, secretly a gay Black Nazi, it’s nearly impossible for the other party to lose. But, yes, nominating nutballs tends to diminish a party’s chances of carrying a swing state or district.
None of this necessarily seemed likely to affect a national presidential election. But if the 2022 patterns really do hold in this year’s election, it might suggest that the shifts in the midterms weren’t just about the issues focused on by different campaigns in different states, but about how new issues altered people’s political allegiances.
It would suggest that the social, economic and political upheaval in the wake of the pandemic, inflation, Jan. 6 and the end of Roe left a lasting political impact — one that was felt very differently in different parts of the country and among different constituencies.
With the polling predictably focused on the battlegrounds, we may not have a great idea on this until the final results arrive in November. If the results wind up looking somewhat more like the midterms, I won’t be surprised. Much crazier things have happened.
Again, this is ultimately speculative. But Cohn’s analysis strikes me as reasonable and even plausible.
I think Trump’s act has worn thin. He’s less popular than he was four, much less eight, years ago. His performance on the stump has clearly declined and the sheer nuttiness of the “They’re eating our pets!!!” type rants is hardly likely to motivate swing voters. And, while she may be a bit of a cipher, Harris doesn’t carry anything like the baggage Hillary Clinton did in 2016.
Further, the demographics keep changing, largely in the Democrats’ favor. Trump carried the over-65s, who constituted 27% of the electorate, 53-44 in 2016. A significant share of that cohort has passed on eight years later. Conversely, Clinton carried the 18-29 demo, a mere 13% of that electorate, 58-28. They’re now 26-37 and much more likely to turn out.
I realize a big part of the article is explicitly downgrading the importance of rural and small state partisan skew, but I think it’s still important to point out that the Democrats don’t automatically have to lose in those states. If nothing else, the modern Republican Party is all about getting into everybody’s business, following people into bathrooms to check out their junk, or picking winners amongst various religions to name just two things. There are many others. While these may play well in the Deep South where social hierarchies and rivalries are so important, Dems could legitimately appeal to the mind-your-own-damn business nature of the Midwest and square states.
@MarkedMan: Also, too. Dems have over the years actually pushed legislation to help those “forgotten” small town/rural voters while GOPs have not. I’m thinking Obamacare, minimum wage, unionization, SS, Medicare, Medicaid, aid to education, etc. But appealing to their baser instincts, as GOPs do, seems to work better politically.
And yes, I think Walz, “mind your own business” is brilliant.
I was just reading the Cohn piece and I am not sure the way he is defining “electoral college advantage” is correct. He is basing it solely on the gap between the popular vote and the vote in the tipping point state if I understand his point. I need to think about it, but I don’t think that metric is doing what the claims it is doing in terms of systematic assessments.
@Steven L. Taylor: This was roughly my thought as well.
With a winner take all setup, tipping points aren’t relevant until they’ve tipped. It doesn’t matter that the window is narrowing. The real Republican advantage in the EC is in the belt of states where there is a lot of land and far fewer people.
Apropos of nothing, I’ve gotten a chuckle over the several versions I’ve seen lately of the headline or subhead, ‘Harris leads nationally, but battleground states are tighter’. Duh.
@Jen: There is an obsession by many of the polling analysts with the “tipping point state.” Since the tipping point is as much one of temporal occurrence (i.e., when the votes are finally tallied and reported), I am not so sure I understand why it is so frequently so central to these conversations. Or, which is possible, I am misunderstanding something.
The bottom line to me is this: if there remains a substantial chance that Trump will lose the popular vote and win the Electoral College (and there is not a commensurate similar chance for Harris) then the EC continues to favor the GOP.
There is also the fact that when Republicans brag about all of those people moving to Texas from California, they seem to think people are doing that because of the conservative lean of the state. It seems to me that it might be more that a majority of those people are moving there in spite of the conservative lean and bringing some of their liberal ides to the state. I think as people age out this might be happening to Florida as well. Georgia and NC are on the knife right now. If either Texas and Florida flips blue or even deep purple the current MAGA wing of the party will be excised to the political backwater in presidential terms and the EC won’t be there to backstop their crazy notions of what a qualified candidate looks like without our a serious correction to something less weird.
I also think Citizens United is turning out to be a lot more impactful then anyone ever imagined. Now it’s so out of control that it can easily prop up a candidate like Trump in the face of his extraordinary unsuitability for the job. Now you have to be as toxic as Mark Robinson or a guy like Roy Moore in 2017. But even then some really unqualified candidates seem to thrive in todays Republican party. And that is because eccentric billionaires can pump unlimited money anywhere they want. Money = speech you know.
New York is worth examining, given Dems’ lackluster performance in 2022 and Hochul’s strikingly narrow 6.4-point victory in the gubernatorial race. The state may be undergoing a rightward shift, and as long as that shift isn’t enough to make the state actually competitive, it benefits Dems at the presidential level by giving the Republicans essentially “wasted” extra votes, just as Dems had many of their votes “wasted” last time by overperforming in noncompetitive states like California, Massachusetts, Colorado, Utah, and more.
I think a few factors are driving these trends: Dobbs, Jan. 6, and the improved Democratic ground game relative to 2020 when they were staying home due to the pandemic.
@Rick DeMent: A friend in Georgia made a similar observation. “When a small white-collar firm relocates to the Atlanta area from New Jersey, the ten top owners/managers vote Republican, and the other hundred workers vote Democratic.”
@Michael Cain: Not to mention any tax incentives that bring creative industries to a state. Want to incentivize movies being made in your state? Prepare for the influx of creatives, who are not widely known for their conservative politics.
@Jen:
Rank the states by population, look at quintiles (with the 1st quintile being the one with the large-population states, others indexed accordingly). The 1st quintile is split pretty evenly. The 5th quintile is also split almost evenly. The Republican’s advantage is mostly in the 3rd and 4th quintiles.
Worth considering if the shifting voting patterns in “safe” states is related to the amount of campaign resources expended there. Trump taught everyone that “it’s the battleground states, stupid” and Harris seems to have upped the emphasis on that spending lots of time and resources on the most swingy of districts
@Steven L. Taylor: Agreed. He’s using Trump’s projected total in 2024 vis-a-vis 2020 and 2016 as an indicator of systemic design, which makes no sense.
By any rational measure, a system in which the Democrat wins 100% of the popular vote in California and gets 100% of California’s electors is less skewed (indeed, is perfectly unskewed) than one in which Democrats win 50.00001% of the popular vote and get all the Electors. In Cohn’s world, that’s unskewed.
I think his overall point—that Trump gaining vote share in states will go blue will offset traditional Republican advantage elsewhere—is interesting and useful. But he’s making it in a really weird way.
I think I get what Cohn is saying, and how he is coming to this conclusion, and I like the focus on wasted votes.
That said, I think all the claims that try to put an Electoral College advantage in terms of a percentage of the national vote are basically oversimplified garbage from a statistical point of view. It assumes that the polls in all states move in lockstep — that a 2% boost to candidate A nationally means a 2% boost in every state, nd that each state has an effectively natural outcome that is skewed by the popular vote.
The correlation between each of the 50 races and the national popular vote is not that straightforward.
I think you could get a meaningful small-state advantage, based on the electoral-votes/population, and then maybe start assigning that to parties based on non-swing states, and then come up with Republicans have a N Electoral College Vote advantage, which would be more meaningful, and actually reflect what matters.
True, but those 8 years are when life happens and the college edumedicated grow up. That demo is more likely to now have kids, and kids in school. They were activist in college, but now that activist training can be used to advocate for their kids and the kids’ futures.
Millennials are 22% of the population, with their peak years 34 and 35 this year, and they’ve been putting away the childish things for the last eight years.
All we can say for sure is that when this election shakes out, things will likely not be as they were before as the parties reshape.
BTW, Trump has been going to the states that would be important in a popular vote election, could be interesting to see what might happen if candidates went after the popular vote like that. If Trump makes significant inroads that may force many to rethink their electoral college hatred.
@JKB:
Yet Donald Trump, the Republican Party’s standard bearer, is 78 years old but screaming “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT” on social media like an immature jackass.
Millennials aren’t getting more rightwing as they age (The Guardian):
Looks like the politics defined by MAGA’s washed-up crybaby cult leader qualify as one of the childish things millennials are putting away.
@JKB: There are actual data on this, and that age demographic far prefers Harris.
Age cohort 30-44 supports Harris 53% to Trump 34%.
@Kylopod: “New York is worth examining, given Dems’ lackluster performance in 2022 and Hochul’s strikingly narrow 6.4-point victory in the gubernatorial race. The state may be undergoing a rightward shift,”
This is one of those myths-turned-fact that everyone accepts and repeats, and it makes me crazy. The primary reason the Dems did more poorly than expected in 2022 was that a conservative state supreme court judge threw out the districting map and instituted one that was hugely favorable to Republicans. A lot of that damage — although not all of it — has been undone since.
And as for Hochul’s struggles suggesting a rightward shift, it’s just the opposite. Democratic opinions of her tend to run from suspicion to outright loathing. And when she was running to be elected for the first time (she had been elected lieutenant governor, then took over when Cuomo stepped down), she was coming off forcing through billions of dollars in tax money to build a football stadium in Buffalo and attempting to replace a very right-wing retiring supreme court justice with an almost equally right wing one — an appointment so egregious that for the first time in history (I believe) it was shot down by the legislature.
Hochul won her place pretty much the same way Eric Adams did — by being the Democrat that the most Republicans would feel comfortable voting for in places where Republicans can’t get arrested. And we’ve seen how well that’s worked out, from Hochul’s total incompetence to Adams’ astonishing corruption.
@JKB: “Millennials are 22% of the population, with their peak years 34 and 35 this year, and they’ve been putting away the childish things for the last eight years.”
Yup. And I don’t think anyone has seen anything more childish than Donald Trump.
@MarkedMan:
While I generally agree with your sentiment there are some caveats. I grew up in the very rural midwest and I know nothing about anything resembling a “mind-your-own-damned” business nature there. What I did experience was busy bodies galore minding my business to ensure I didn’t appear to be liberal(DEMONRAT1!!) or gay or free thinking. They are only “mind-your-own-damned” business when outsiders tell them to stop hating on minority groups or to stop forcing religion on people. The rank hypocrisy of the church going midesterner is a sight to see. One of which I’m glad to not have to deal with anymore outside of visiting family in my hometown area. Not surprisingly anyone with a brain and the capability will move out ASAP. Brain drain to the cities is a very real thing.
The people in midwestern cities and suburbs are definitely viable targets for Democratic outreach and GOTV. A lot of them still vote GOP simply because generations of their family have voted GOP since the 60s.
Counterpoint to the line “Unless the candidate is a serial dater of barely-legal girls”, see Matt Gaetz. Republicans are the really worst hypocrites.
@Michael Cain: Wait… The other hundred workers aren’t being laid off in hopes of finding a cheaper local labor pool?
@JKB:
And advantaging their kids’ futures is going to be accomplished by voting Republican/Trump? F**k! What state is that? I’d consider moving there–and I’ve never had any kids!
@JKB: They were activist in college, but now that activist training can be used to advocate for their kids and the kids’ futures.
The entire premise of his campaign is that the nonexistent problems he’s invented will all be solved. The concept is that the US is “failing” – that cities are dens of increasing (nope) immigrant (nope) crime; that the dollar is falling out of international favor (nope); that the DoJ is being weaponized against him unfairly (nope); that elections are rigged (nope) or unfair (nope) or biased (nope) or unchecked (nope) or somehow just done wrong (nope) if the outcome isn’t what he wants; that men are having sex changes at 15 (nope) to enter women’s sports in droves (nope) and then having regrets in like 3 years because they were just confused (nope nope nope omfg nope); that regulation is stifling business (nope) and innovation (nope) and bad for everyone (nope); that inflation is out of control (nope) and our economy is a shambles (nope) and wages are down (nope) and energy – especially gas – is expensive (nope) and imported (nope).
Even more egregious is his claim that he and he alone knows how to fix every problem in the world – we have 4 years of evidence that he’s a guy with a bottle of Elmer’s glue telling you he can fix an elevator, but no he won’t stand by the work, and if something happens it’s the glue’s fault. I’ve said it before, and I stand by it: Trump has a pre-pubescent mind and a toddler’s outlook on the world.
If so many people like you weren’t such complete g-d idiots unwilling to recognize that you’re swimming in Nazi feces and unsavory-grandpa fantasy worlds, the entire GOP/Trump platform would be a pathetic comedy. It’s the last sad gasp of a salesman with nothing to offer, a salesman who promised a Ferrari in 2016 and barely managed to come up with a driveable Aerostar, but in 2024 he wants you to know that he was this close to that Ferrari and also now the Ferrari has fucking unicorn powers.
Yes, you need to grow up and get rid of childish things. It’s time to exit the bizarre fantasy universe where Donald Trump is anything but a schlumpy old man looking to quickly separate you and that dollar bill.
> And there’s not much incentive to poll in places where the outcome is in doubt.
*not in doubt