Ever since Donald Trump’s stunning victory in 2016 — when he lost the popular vote by almost 3 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.
According to The New York Times’ polling average, it does not seem that Vice President 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, 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 Trump’s advantage less than 1 point.
By this measure, Trump’s advantage is only around one-fifth as large as it was four years ago, when Joe Biden fared 3.8 points better nationally than in Wisconsin (the tipping-point state in 2020).
How is it possible?
On the one hand, Harris is holding her own in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. It’s worth noting this is tenuous: Together, these states help Harris win the Electoral College, with little room for error. Should the polls meaningfully underestimate 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 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.
Electoral College math 101
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, 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 1 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 7 points compared with Barack Obama. These gains helped her win the popular vote nationally, but they did nothing to help in the Electoral College.
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 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, Harris is faring a hair better than Biden’s election results across these states.
The national polls, on the other hand, show Harris faring about 2 points worse than Biden’s results. Clearly, Trump is polling better in noncompetitive parts of the country, even as Harris shows resilience where it counts. Together, it reduces the size of Trump’s advantage in the Electoral College.
A midterm repeat?
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 Trump’s 2020 performance in New York, Florida and much of the Deep South. They also ran well ahead of 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.
While the evidence is inconclusive, there are signs that Trump is excelling in many of the places where Republicans won big in the midterms.
One piece of evidence: Times/Siena College polling this year. If this year’s national surveys are aggregated together — including the polls when Biden was the nominee — there’s a clear relationship between Trump’s gains and how well Republicans fared in the midterms.
Although there’s less data from the three Times/Siena polls since Harris became the nominee, they nonetheless show the same pattern: 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 Harris is struggling, relatively speaking, but that evidence mostly comes from our partners at Siena. Their methodology is different from the Times/Siena poll, but not so different that it counts as independent corroboration. On the other hand, Harris holds up relatively well in most of the Texas, Florida and California polling, so it’s not a straightforward picture.
There’s another issue with the state polling: By a 2-to-1 margin, the polls that you see nowadays are weighted by “recall vote.” This is a little wonky, but it means that the number of respondents who say they voted for Biden and Trump is adjusted to match the actual result of the last election. Whatever the merits of this approach, it has the consequence of forcing many state polls into very close alignment with the 2020 result. The polls that do not weight by past vote, however, show results that correlate as much with the midterm vote as the last presidential election.
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.
Demographics
Eight years ago, 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 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 Harris’ path of least resistance in the current state polling.
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 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 Trump’s gains among nonwhite voters might be greater in noncompetitive states would start to help make sense of several different electoral trends.
A lasting shift?
Why did the Republicans do so well in some places, but not others, 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 Trump; there, the “red wave” sloshed ashore, unimpeded.
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.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
© 2024 The New York Times Company