America’s electoral college and the popular vote

By THE DATA TEAM

AMERICA’S presidential election on November 8th shone a light on a quirk of its electoral system: the use of the electoral college rather than the popular vote to decide the winner. Donald Trump won by accumulating more electoral-college votes (EVs) than Hillary Clinton. Yet 2.9m more people voted for Mrs Clinton than for Mr Trump. She lost despite having a 2.09% advantage in the popular vote, greater than that enjoyed by the winning candidates in three elections over the past six decades: Jimmy Carter in 1976 (who won the popular vote by 2.07%), Richard Nixon in 1968 (0.7%) and John Kennedy in 1960 (0.17%). Losing the popular vote diminishes an electoral mandate. This is a sore point for Mr Trump, who has tweeted that it was really he who came first on that measure because millions voted illegally (without giving a shred of evidence). This was the second election out of the past five in which the person who received the most votes nationally ended up losing.

There have been other elections in recent decades where the winner of the electoral college would have been different if fewer than 60,000 voters had switched sides (see chart). In 2016, Hillary Clinton fell short of victory by 38 EVs. The closest battleground states that would have given her those EVs were Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Mr Trump won a combined 77,000 more votes in those states than Mrs Clinton. So if 39,000 people had voted for her in those three rather than for Mr Trump, she would have won the electoral college and the White House. In 2000 a switch of fewer than 300 voters in Florida would have made Al Gore president. Forty years ago, a combined swing of 6,400 voters in Delaware, Hawaii and Ohio would have put Gerald Ford ahead of Jimmy Carter in the electoral college. Last month Mr Gore said he thinks America will adopt the popular vote within a decade, although there is no desire in Congress, which reconvenes in early January to certify the vote, to even consider the issue. Barack Obama has called the electoral college a "vestige" from the past. Indeed, there has been disquiet about the process before, among both Republicans and Democrats, and not always because of sour grapes.