Mountains Out of Molehills
This graph shows how the electoral vote has been distributed in Presidential elections during the same period of time.
Another graph shows how the popular and electoral victory margins compare over time, regardless of which party won.
These graphs make abundantly clear how exaggerated the electoral results are compared to the popular votes. The victories are that much bigger, the losses that much worse — and the third parties make far less of an impact. Even ignoring the fact that a candidate can win the electoral vote, and hence the election, without winning the popular vote, it’s apparent how misleading it is to look at election results in terms of electoral votes. Any electoral landslide must be taken with a proportionally large grain of salt.
For example, Reagan’s wins in the 1980s were huge electoral landslides — and touted as grand victories for the Republican party. But in 1980, Reagan won with a mere 51% of the popular vote — far less than the 91% of electoral votes he received. Even in 1984 he only got 59% of the popular vote. To be sure, that’s a big popular vote win, but it’s nowhere near the 98% of electoral votes that came along with the popular votes.
On the other hand, in 1920, Harding won with 62% of the popular vote — the largest popular vote victory ever recorded — and yet he got only 76% of the electoral votes. This places his electoral win in 15th place out of the 33 elections reviewed here! So the issue isn’t simply that electoral figures exaggerate popular figures — it’s that they provide a fundamentally and unpredictably deceptive picture of popular opinion.
Interestingly, nothing says it has to be this way. The winner-takes-all-electoral-votes approach is what skews the results so much, yet this is simply a choice on the part of states — it’s not a federally mandated system. Indeed, Maine and Nebraska divvy their electoral votes up along the lines of their popular votes — and any state that wished to could do so as well. Far more than any individual state’s vote counting issues, and without even considering abandoning the Electoral College (though that certainly could be considered), this would yield more sensible electionresults.
Read on: Ignorance Isn’t Bliss
For a fascinating look at how these ideas reveal the red/blue state notion to be totally misleading, see One State, Two State, Red State, Blue State by Giulianna Lamanna.
[…] …read the site’s inaugural essay, “The Truth (Damned Truth) of Election Statistics” (https://www.potluck.com/2004/05/the-truth-damned-truth-of-election-statistics/), hopefully a provocative piece for this U.S. Presidential election year, […]
“Anatole has been explaining to me the native system of government. He says the business of throwing pebbles into bowls with the most pebbles winning an election — that was Belgium’s idea of fair play, but to people here it was peculiar. To Congolese (including Anatole himself, he confessed) it seems odd that if one man gets fifty votes and the other gets forty-nine, the first one wins altogether and the second one plumb loses. That means almost half the people will be unhappy, and according to Anatole, in a village that’s left halfway unhappy you haven’t heard the end of it. There is sure to be trouble somewhere down the line.
“The way it seems to work here is that you need one hundred percent. It takes a good while to get there. They talk and make deals and argue until they are pretty much all in agreement on what ought to be done, and then Tata Ndu makes sure it happens that way. If he does a good job, one of his sons will be chief after he dies.”
—Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible