What Really Happened in the Electoral College, I

               After occurring only four times, three of them in the nineteenth century, it happened again. For decades, the possibility that the winner of the popular vote for President might lose the Electoral College was seen as a quirk of the American electoral system or a historical curiosity. Now, for the second time in less than twenty years, it was a reality.

                Sound familiar?

               In red states, Mitt Romney was an impressive vote-getter, winning by wide margins in several states that had come close to voting for President Barack Obama in 2008. He flipped Florida and Ohio, as well as three traditionally Republican states- Indiana, Virginia, and North Carolina- whose diversifying electorates gave them to Obama four years ago. Yet a string of smaller battleground states- Colorado, Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and Wisconsin- as well as Pennsylvania, where the Romney campaign eschewed a serious effort until the last few weeks of the campaign, held for President Obama by margins of a few thousand votes each, giving the incumbent a 272-266 victory in the Electoral College even as Mitt Romney won the popular vote by roughly 800,000 votes.

States Narrowly Voting for Barack Obama, 2012
State	Margin of Victory as Percent of the Vote	Electoral Votes
Florida	0.88	29
Ohio	2.97	18
National Popular Vote	3.86	--
Virginia	3.87	13
Colorado	5.36	9
Pennsylvania	5.38	20
New Hampshire	5.58	4
Iowa	5.81	6
Nevada	6.68	6
Wisconsin	6.94	10

In 2012, The Electoral College Favored Obama

In the real world, President Obama won both the popular vote, by a margin of 3.86%, and the Electoral College, by a vote of 332 to 206.* However, a swing of about 2.2% of the vote, if it were proportionally distributed across the states, would have produced the scenario described above. President Obama won two states, Florida and Ohio, more narrowly than the popular vote, and a third, Virginia, by almost the same percentage as the popular vote. If those three states had switched to Mitt Romney, Obama still would have won the Electoral College, albeit by a narrower margin. To win the Electoral College, Romney needed a fourth state to change- and the next closest, Colorado, voted by a full percentage point and a half more for Obama than the national popular vote. Mitt Romney could have won the popular vote by up to 1.5 percent- over 1.9 million votes out of 129 million cast- and still lost the Electoral College.

Quantifying Trump’s Performance in the States

So, how did the Electoral College go from a slight bias toward the Democratic candidate to an even wider one for the Republican?

Donald Trump improved on Mitt Romney’s national popular vote total by about 3.3 percent, from just under 61 million to just under 63 million. Hillary Clinton received about 62,000 fewer votes, or 0.1 percent, than Barack Obama did in 2012. Minor party and write-in votes surged from 2.4 million in 2012 to 8.3 million in 2016, for an overall increase in voter turnout of about six percent nationwide.

If these effects were evenly distributed across the country- if Donald Trump had gained on Mitt Romney by 3.3% in every state, and Hillary Clinton had dropped off by 0.1% in every state- Clinton’s popular vote plurality would carry every Obama state from 2012 except Florida, enough for her to win.  The map and chart below compare the actual results to that theoretical result.

 

 

States with Overperformances Above 100,000 Votes
State	Predicted Result	Actual Result	Overperformance
Arizona	Trump +250,949	Trump +91,234	Clinton +159,715
California	Clinton +2,843,712	Clinton +4,269,978	Clinton +1,426,266
Georgia	Trump +376,564	Trump +211,141	Clinton +165,423
Illinois	Clinton +809,465	Clinton +944,714	Clinton +135,249
Indiana	Trump +317,619	Trump +524,160	Trump +206,541
Iowa	Clinton +66,529	Trump +147,314	Trump +213,843
Kentucky	Trump +445,077	Trump +574,117	Trump +129,040
Massachusetts	Clinton +691,413	Clinton +904,303	Clinton +212,890
Michigan	Clinton +375,602	Trump +10,704	Trump +386,306
Minnesota	Clinton +172,271	Clinton +44,593	Trump +135,396
Missouri	Trump +309,739	Trump +523,443	Trump +213,704
New York	Clinton +1,907,151	Clinton +1,736,585	Trump +170,566
Ohio	Clinton +73,920	Trump +446,837	Trump +520,757
Pennsylvania	Clinton +216,689	Trump +44,292	Trump +260,981
Tennessee	Trump +551,780	Trump +652,230	Trump +100,450
Texas	Trump +1,418,770	Trump +807,179	Clinton +611,591
Utah	Trump +513,959	Trump +204,555	Clinton +309,404
Virginia	Clinton +86,022	Clinton +212,030	Clinton +126,008
Washington	Clinton +419,562	Clinton +520,971	Clinton +101,409
West Virginia	Trump +193,676	Trump +300,577	Trump +106,901
Wisconsin	Clinton +164,040	Trump +22,748	Trump +186,788

 

Donald Trump’s overperformances were more widespread than Hillary Clinton’s. Trump overperformed in thirty-five states, while Clinton overperformed in fifteen and the District of Columbia. Hillary Clinton's overperformances were concentrated in California, where she overperformed by 1.4 million votes, and Texas, where she overperformed by over 600,000 votes. All these did was turn already blue California bluer and reduce Trump's margins in Texas, but not enough to carry the state or even make Trump devote resources to holding it. The only state where Trump overperformed by over 500,000 votes was Ohio, which flipped the state.

Among the other states where Hillary Clinton overperformed by between 100,000 and 500,000 votes, only Virginia was a battleground in 2012. Three of the others (Arizona, Georgia, and Utah) were states that are moving toward the Democrats, but not by enough for Clinton to carry them in 2016, the remaining three (Illinois, Massachusetts, and Washington) were safe Democratic states where she ran up the margins. Donald Trump, by contrast, had the good fortune to overperform where he most needed to: a group of states roughly bordered by the Mississippi Valley, the Great Lakes, and the Appalachians. He overperformed by between 100,000 and 500,000 votes in eleven states, and among those states, only New York was out of reach for Republicans. Five other states (Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri, Tennessee, and West Virginia) were already securely Republican. The other five included the four Rust Belt states, in addition to Ohio, to switch from Obama to Trump (Iowa, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin) and Minnesota, where Donald Trump came within 45,000 votes of being the first Republican to carry the state since Richard Nixon’s 1972 landslide.

Hillary Clinton’s overperformances made blue states bluer or red states closer; Donald Trump’s made blue states red.