Mad about the Electoral College? Blame California.
What an eccentricity in the model reveals about the Electoral College. And why Angelinos should move to Alaska.
I’m in California this morning, and I’ll fly home to New York this afternoon. Apart from about 30 minutes we’ll spend over Nevada on the way out and the same interval over Pennsylvania on the way in — and perhaps a few moments over Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District — we won’t spend any time in places whose electoral votes will matter in November’s election.
Although… let me amend that. It’s pretty nice for Kamala Harris that she’ll win California’s 54 electoral votes and New York’s 28 without so much as batting an eyelash. And dominating in “flyover country” — for instance, Utah, and (probably) Iowa — is worth a little something for Donald Trump, too. But as you can see, there’s an inequity here. The states where Harris will win handily have more electoral votes, and she’ll win them by larger margins. Trump’s projected 7-point win in Iowa is enough that Harris probably won’t repeat Hillary Clinton’s mistake of spending electoral resources there, but it isn’t the 25-point drubbing that the model projects for Harris here in Cali. As a result, there’s almost a 25 percent chance that Harris wins the popular vote but loses the Electoral College — but little of the other way around.
Suppose I chat with one of my politically astute liberal friends about the Electoral College. In that case, they’ll probably lament the extra electoral leverage given to the big square states in the middle of the country. But that’s far more of an issue for Democrats in the Senate than in the Electoral College. As you probably know, electoral votes are determined by a state’s number of U.S. Senators (two each) plus its count of U.S. Representatives. The latter outnumber the former by more than 4:1, and Congressional apportionments are based on population. So the proportionately higher number of electoral votes given to states like Wyoming is only a small part of the issue.
Rather, Harris’s main problem is that Democrats have far more votes than they need in California and New York — maybe the smartly dressed liberals on the flight I’ll board later should move to Alaska instead — while there isn’t any comparable Republican voter dumping ground. The largest probable Trump states by electoral votes are Texas (40) and Florida (30). But they’ll still be somewhat close, most likely. If a bunch of GOP voters were to flee them for, say, Rhode Island, they’d actually be quite competitive and the risk-reward ratio might not be worth it.
What a seeming anomaly in the model tells us about the Electoral College
A week or two ago, a seeming contradiction in the model confused some of our readers. For instance, on Aug. 30, Harris was projected to win (slightly) more electoral votes (270 to 268) — but Trump was very slightly favored (52 percent to 47 percent) to win the Electoral College. As the Electoral College race tightens back to 50/50, this may happen again soon, perhaps as soon as in today’s model run.
Is this some sort of programming error? Nope, absolutely not. It reflects a structural asymmetry: the mean Electoral College projection (how many votes the candidates win in an average simulation) differs meaningfully from the median (how often they hit exactly 270 or more). Harris has both a higher floor and a higher ceiling. Sounds pretty advantageous, right? But it’s not. The trade-off is that Trump wins more of the close calls where Harris comes just a state or two away from victory.
You can see this from the electoral vote distribution charts that we show on our model landing page: