A margin of victory of just a few percentage points in the popular vote could translate into an Electoral College victory for Vice President Harris, a significant shift from the last two cycles in which Democrats faced a significant disadvantage in the count.
The reason for this is shifts in the electorate that allow Republicans to beat Democrats when it comes to the popular vote, but that may not translate into more electoral votes for former President Trump and the Republican Party.
“Because of Republican gains in states like California, New York and Florida, it helps with the popular vote, and it even helps in the House of Representatives, but it’s not efficient from an Electoral College standpoint,” said Zachary Donnini, data scientist at Decision. Bureau Headquarters (DDHQ).
“You can win some states that you win by a big margin, and they don’t help you anymore,” said Jason Roberts, a professor of political science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “Winning a state at 80 to 20 is no more helpful than winning at 55 to 45.”
Democrats are largely victims of this effect. Since 2000, Democrats have won the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections. But they won the Electoral College in only three of those cycles.
In 2016, Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes, but fell short of victory. She did better than Trump when it came to the popular vote in states like California and New York, but that was little help when she won only 232 electoral votes.
To win the Electoral College, a candidate must receive at least 270 electoral votes.
Sixteen years earlier, Vice President Al Gore lost the Electoral College to Republican George W. Bush, even though Gore won the popular vote.
In 2020, President Biden won both, but his lead in the popular vote and the Electoral College obscured how close the election was. Biden won the popular vote by 7 million votes and won 306 electoral votes, but he only won in key states that put him over the top by a few tens of thousands of votes at most.
Donnini said the circumstances of the 2020 race meant Trump still had a chance on the electoral ballot, even if he lost the popular vote by as much as 3.5 points. Biden won the popular vote by about 4.5 points.
This election cycle looks a little different.
If Harris wins the popular vote by 3.5 points, she has an 80 percent or better chance of winning the presidency, Donnini said. This is because polls show her performing better in the “blue wall” states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin than nationally.
As a result, Harris’ margin in the popular vote likely won’t have to be as large as the margins of previous Democratic candidates.
“There’s a lot of random variation here based on this, but our DDHQ’s modeling, in our forecast right now, puts that number between 1.5 and 2.5 percent compared to 2020’s 3.7 percent,” said Donnini. “So we think it’s getting smaller, but we’re not completely sure.”
Opinion polls showing demographic shifts in each candidate’s support could explain some of this shift.
Chris Jackson, Ipsos’ senior vice president of public affairs, said Harris has not performed as well as Biden among minority voters but appears to be improving somewhat among white voters.
This could mean she loses some ground in Democratic strongholds like California and New York, while still winning them comfortably, but gaining ground in the key states needed to reach 270 electoral votes.
“Given that swing states, especially swing states in the Midwest, are much whiter than the country as a whole, stronger performance among white voters means she has a little more room in those states to offset any losses among minority voters,” she said. Jackson.
He said Clinton was just a “flip of a coin” away from winning the Electoral College in 2016, losing only a fraction of a percentage point in key states. A 2-point victory in the popular vote, like Clinton’s, could give her the White House this year.
But a win by just one point could fall short.
“I think anything less than two points is a really troubling warning sign,” Jackson said.
And the possibility remains, though unlikely, that the opposite effect could occur if Trump were to win the popular vote and lose the Electoral College.
John Cluverius, the assistant director of the Center for Public Opinion at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, said he could see both scenarios happening, with Trump barely winning the popular vote and Harris barely winning the electoral vote if the former president were in the traditional can cutting. Democratic lead in California and New York is enough.
Another possible viable path could be for Trump to “run up the score” among Latinos in states like Texas and Florida. Polls and recent elections show Republicans making gains against Latinos, although a majority of the group still favored Democrats.
Cluverius said a “traditional” situation in which Harris wins the popular vote but not the electoral vote seems more likely, but some may underestimate how much certain key districts in blue states are talking about issues like immigration, which voters broadly favor Republicans.
“I think people start with a lot of assumptions about the electorate based on that historical data,” he said. “That’s not a bad thing, but it also means that people are going to assume that what’s going to happen is traditional Democratic strength in the popular vote and traditional Republican strength in the electoral vote.”
Cluverius added that the amount of split-ticket votes could be key in determining the margins. Polls regularly show this Democratic Senate candidates are performing relatively strongly compared to the top candidates, although split-ticket voting has not occurred in large numbers in recent history.
“Because there is so much uncertainty in the race, because the race is so close, we have to have a broad mindset about what could potentially happen,” he said.
Jackson noted that ultimately more people support Harris and Trump than will vote for them in the election, meaning the party better able to mobilize their supporters could be the winner. He said polls can sometimes struggle to measure this adequately because it can measure how likely someone is to vote but cannot guarantee their behavior.
“We should all be prepared for a very close race to something more like a blowout, which in a survey context is still only a few percentage points,” he said.
Caroline Vakil contributed.
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