Bloomberg via Getty Images It's that time again: time for Americans to figure out how, exactly, their presidential election works. "Electoral College" searches spike every four years, just before Election Day, according to Google ... and the search volume is picking up right now.
Long story short: To win the presidency, you don't have to win the majority of the popular vote. You have to win the majority of electoral votes — that is, 270 of them.* In most states, a candidate wins electoral votes by winning the most voters. So. Win a state by just one vote, and you win all of its electoral votes (unless you live in Nebraska or Maine, which divvy up their votes a little differently). This can lead to off-kilter election results — in 2000, for example, Democrat Al Gore won the popular vote by a few hundred thousand votes, but lost the presidency by five electoral votes. So we wondered: Just how few votes would a candidate need to win 270 electoral votes? We decided to find out. A candidate only needs to win the 11 states with the most electoral votes to hit 270. Assuming only two candidates (a big assumption; see below) and that one candidate won all of those states by just one vote, and then didn't win a single vote in any of the other states (or D.C.), how many votes would that candidate have to win? It depends on how you do the math. Either way, it's far less than half. Initially when we did this story, we found that if you start with the biggest-electoral-vote states, the answer is 27 percent. However, we have an update: as Andrej Schoeke very nicely pointed out to us on Twitter, there's another way to do it (via CGP Grey) that requires even less of the popular vote: start with the smallest-electoral-vote states. Our math went through a few iterations on this but by our final math, in 2012 that could have meant winning the presidency with only around 23 percent of the popular vote. The idea here is that a voter in a low-population state like Wyoming counts for a larger share of electoral votes than popular votes. And if one were to start with the largest states, it would be 27 percent. Here's a look at that math: We're making a lot of assumptions here — we're using vote totals from 2012, for one thing. Moreover, we're assuming there are only two candidates in the race. And let's be clear about the obvious here: This kind of an extreme election isn't going to happen. And if it did — if there were somehow a bunch of 1- or 2-vote wins, you can bet the recounts would stretch into 2017. And we're also sure that with any number of tweaks to the math (like plugging in a third or fourth candidate), you could come up with results that are slightly-to-moderately different. But that's not really the point here. The point is that the Electoral College can skew election results to a fantastic degree. How a 7-point win becomes a "landslide" This kind of popular-electoral vote discrepancy is why some articles about the 2008 election had to be careful to call Obama's win an electoral landslide — he won 68 percent of the electoral vote but only about 53 percent of the popular vote. Skewed wins like this happen regularly in U.S. elections — a modest popular vote margin can yield a ridiculously large Electoral College margin. For example, in 1984, Ronald Reagan beat Walter Mondale in the popular vote by 18 points — a sizable gap, but nothing like the Electoral College walloping: Reagan won 525 electoral votes, beating Mondale by 95 percentage points. Here's what those gaps look like in every election going back to 1960's race, in which John F. Kennedy only squeaked past Richard Nixon in the popular vote by around 100,000 votes: Ironically, the 2000 election — whose outcome struck many people as unfair because Gore won the popular vote but not the electoral vote — also has the electoral-vote margin that most closely reflects the popular-vote margin. In that sense, one could call it one of the "fairest" elections in modern politics. Well, maybe. But then, come Nov. 9, there will be no difference for the losing candidate between getting 250 electoral votes or 150 — a loss is a loss. The difference an Electoral College makes The Electoral College and current demographics mean that both parties often take particular electoral votes for granted: Democrats regularly win California and New York, while Republicans win Texas and Georgia (however, things have been closer than usual in those states this year). (Likewise, there are plenty of easy wins for each party at the low end of the spectrum. Wyoming is regularly Republican. Hawaii regularly votes Democratic.) And that means that candidates regularly spend a disproportionate amount of time in high-electoral-vote battleground states like Florida and Ohio as they plot their "paths to 270." This means voters in Los Angeles or San Antonio (or Cheyenne or Honolulu) don't get that much attention. If the Electoral College disappeared tomorrow, campaign strategy would probably shift dramatically; Democrats might campaign more in Austin, Texas. Republicans might do more outreach in conservative parts of California. Either way, the people of Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania might get some respite from the onslaught of rallies and ads every four years, as candidates try harder to win bigger parts of the country. *Before you fire off an email, yes, we know: You can still win the presidency without winning 270 electoral votes. If no candidate hits 270, then the House votes. But we're talking outright on election night. (Byambasuren Byamba-Ochir/AFP via Getty Images) The Electoral College has played an outsize role in several recent U.S. elections, and a majority of Americans would welcome a change to the way presidents are elected.
In both 2000 and 2016, the winners of the popular vote lost their bids for the U.S. presidency after receiving fewer votes in the Electoral College than their opponents. To continue tracking how the public views the U.S. system for presidential elections, we surveyed 6,174 U.S. adults from June 27 to July 4, 2022. Everyone who took part is a member of Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories. Read more about the ATP’s methodology. Here are the questions used for this analysis, along with responses, and its methodology. Around six-in-ten U.S. adults (63%) say the way the president is elected should be changed so that the winner of the popular vote nationwide wins the presidency, while 35% favor keeping the current Electoral College system, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted June 27-July 4, 2022. There has been a modest increase in the share of Americans who favor changing the way presidents are elected: In January 2021, the last time the Center asked this question, 55% said the system should be changed, while 43% supported maintaining the existing system. The current electoral system in the United States allows for the possibility that the winner of the popular vote may not be able to secure enough Electoral College votes to win the presidency. This was the case in both the 2000 and 2016 elections, which were won by George W. Bush and Donald Trump, respectively. As in past years, Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents are far more likely than Republicans and Republican leaners to support moving to a popular vote system (80% vs. 42%). The share of Democrats saying this is up 9 percentage points from January 2021, but about on par with views in 2020. While a majority of Republicans (56%) continue to say the current Electoral College system should be maintained, the share who now express support for moving to a popular vote system is the highest it’s been since the 2016 election: 42% say this today, up from 37% in 2021 and just 27% in the immediate wake of the 2016 election. Liberal Democrats are especially likely to say they would prefer changing the system to be based on the popular vote (87% say this). By contrast, conservative Republicans are particularly likely to prefer keeping the current system where the winner of the Electoral College vote takes office (66% say this). Younger adults are somewhat more supportive of changing the system than older adults: Seven-in-ten Americans ages 18 to 29 support changing the system, compared with 56% of those 65 or older. And partisan divides in views of the Electoral College are most pronounced among those who pay the most attention to politics. Among partisans who say they follow what is going on in government and public affairs “most of the time,” 85% of Democrats – but only 24% of Republicans – say they favor changing the system. For those who say they follow politics “only now and then” or “hardly at all,” there is a much smaller partisan gap, with 74% of Democrats and 59% of Republicans saying they favor changing the system. Note: This is an update of a post originally published on Jan. 27, 2021, written by Bradley Jones, a former senior researcher at the Center. Here are the questions used for this analysis, along with responses, and its methodology.
In January 2020, Pew Research Center ran a survey experiment in which this question was asked in two slightly different ways. One used the language that had been used in 2000 and in subsequent years, with the reform option asking about “amending the Constitution so the candidate who receives the most votes nationwide wins the election.” The other modified the reform option to “changing the system so the candidate who receives the most votes nationwide wins the election.” The January 2020 survey revealed no substantive differences between asking about “amending the Constitution” and “changing the system.” We conducted this experiment in large part because reforming the way presidents are selected does not technically require amending the Constitution. The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, for example, theoretically could accomplish the same end without the need for a constitutional amendment. Since there was no substantive difference in the survey results between the two question wordings, we have adopted the revised wording.
Topic Election System & Voting Process |