How the US Electoral College can turn a loser into a winner

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How the US Electoral College can turn a loser into a winner

时间：2024-11-04 03:00 来源：未知作者：admin 阅读：次

Donald Trump has run for US president twice already, and both times he was the loser in terms of sheer number of votes across the country.

The reason he became president in 2016, despite losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton, is because the election winner is actually determined through a system called the Electoral College.

In the 2024 race, national polls show Trump in a neck-and-neck race with Kamala Harris. Either one could take out a majority of votes nationwide.

But neither candidate needs to win the popular vote at all — the real question is will they win votes where it counts the most?

How does the Electoral College work?

Each hexagon represents an Electoral College vote.

The Electoral College is a group of 538 people, who represent their states and officially choose the winner of the presidential election.

A candidate needs to win the majority of these electors' votes – at least 270 – to win the election.

Each hexagon on this map represents one Electoral College vote.

The number in each state broadly reflects population figures. Though far from perfectly.

Take a look at California and Vermont, for example.

California and Vermont have vastly different population levels

As the state with the largest population, California has the most electors at 54.

Meanwhile, Vermont has three electors to reflect its much smaller population.

So how does a candidate win electors?

Generally, it's simple: win the most votes in a state and all its electoral votes are yours.

For example, Trump won the most votes in Texas during the 2020 election.

That means he claimed all 38 electoral votes up for grabs in the state.

Meanwhile, in New York, Joe Biden came out on top so he picked up 29 electoral votes there.

Donald Trump won Texas but Joe Biden took New York.

Here's a look at the final results of the 2020 election.

Mr Biden won more electoral votes than Trump — a resounding 306 to 232 in the end.

Biden beat Trump by 306 to 232, which was Trump's winning margin four years earlier.

So, despite unfounded claims to the contrary, Mr Biden won the presidency.

Simple, right? Well, actually...

There are two exceptions to the winner-takes-all rule when it comes to allocating states' electoral votes: Maine and Nebraska.

Only two of their electoral votes are won by being the most popular candidate in the state.

The remaining votes are awarded individually to the popular winner of each congressional district.

That means in Maine and Nebraska, a candidate can pick up an extra electoral vote or two, even if the majority of people don't vote for them.

Splits like this aren't seen very often.

The first time ever was in Nebraska in 2008 and the second was in Maine in 2016.

But in the 2020 election, a split happened in both states.

Nebraska and Maine both had split results four years ago.

So how can the most popular candidate lose the election?

Every now and then, the person who ends up in power isn't the preferred president for most voters.

In fact, it's happened twice in the past six elections.

The most recent was 2016.

Even though almost 3 million more people voted for Ms Clinton than for Trump, he picked up more Electoral College votes and therefore the keys to the White House.

The 2016 election was won by the candidate who lost the popular vote.

David Smith, an associate professor at US Studies Centre, says the key factor is where votes are won.

"In 2016, Ms Clinton got large margins in New York and California, which meant she had a popular vote lead of about 2.9 million," Dr Smith says.

"But those margins didn't matter."

Ms Clinton would have gathered 84 electoral votes from New York and California regardless of whether millions more people voted for her, or just one person. So those millions of votes drove a big lead in the popular vote, but not so much in the Electoral College.

Which, remember, is where it counts.

And that's where Trump came up, well, trumps.

"It came down to these very, very narrow margins in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin," Dr Smith explains.

In Wisconsin, just 22,748 more people voted for Trump than for Ms Clinton. He picked up 10 electoral votes there.

In Michigan, there was a difference of just 10,704 votes that handed Trump a further 16 electoral votes.

And in perhaps the biggest blow to the Clinton campaign, she lost the 20 electoral votes in Pennsylvania by a margin of 44,292.

In other words, Trump won these states by very small margins in terms of the popular vote, but they delivered crucial numbers in the Electoral College — the reverse effect of what we saw with Ms Clinton in California and New York.

If Ms Clinton had managed to flip her small losses in these three states, she would have had 278 electoral votes — winning both the popular vote and the presidency.

But she didn't have the votes where it counted.

Four years later, Mr Biden did.

Not only did he manage to flip those three states back for the Democrats with narrow victories, he won in Arizona and Georgia to reverse the election outcome.

Dr Smith says disparities between the popular vote and the Electoral College have become more common in recent election cycles.

"George W Bush won the 2000 election in controversial circumstances after a recount was stopped in Florida – he won it in Florida by just 600 votes and lost the popular vote by half a million.

"Even in cases where the Electoral College and popular vote have gone the same way, like in 2004 and 2020, they came very, very close to having results which were at odds."

How likely is this outcome in 2024?

It depends on which candidate we're talking about.

For Ms Harris, it's a distinct possibility.

Forecasting models, including Nate Silver's Silver Bulletin, say there's a 29 per cent chance she will win the popular vote but lose the Electoral College.

"It could well happen this year," Dr Smith agrees. "[The] swing states are very close. She's from California, so she's going to run up the numbers there."

The same outcome is far less likely for Trump – less than 1 per cent, according to the Silver Bulletin.

That's because even though Trump has a better shot at winning the popular vote than in his previous campaigns, he's not likely to simultaneously lose the Electoral College.

"You would think if he won the popular vote, it would be almost certain that he would also win the Electoral College," Dr Smith explains.

But at this point, with polls exceptionally tight across the country, anything seems possible.