What States Do You Have to Win to Be President
Rakeda Leaks (right) and Candice Williams fill up out Electoral College maps on election night 2008. Bloomberg via Getty Images hibernate explanation
toggle caption
Bloomberg via Getty Images
Rakeda Leaks (correct) and Candice Williams fill out Electoral Higher maps on election night 2008.
Bloomberg via Getty Images
It's that fourth dimension once again: time for Americans to figure out how, exactly, their presidential ballot works. "Balloter College" searches spike every iv years, just earlier Ballot Day, according to Google ... and the search volume is picking up correct now.
Long story curt: To win the presidency, you don't accept to win the bulk of the pop vote. You take to win the majority of electoral votes — that is, 270 of them.* In well-nigh states, a candidate wins electoral votes by winning the near voters.
And so. Win a country by just i vote, and you lot win all of its balloter votes (unless you live in Nebraska or Maine, which divvy upwards their votes a picayune differently).
This tin lead to off-kilter election results — in 2000, for instance, Democrat Al Gore won the popular vote past a few hundred yard votes, only lost the presidency by 5 electoral votes. And so we wondered: Simply how few votes would a candidate need to win 270 electoral votes?
Nosotros decided to find out. A candidate only needs to win the xi states with the most electoral votes to hit 270. Bold only ii candidates (a big assumption; see below) and that i candidate won all of those states by just i vote, and then didn't win a single vote in whatever of the other states (or D.C.), how many votes would that candidate take to win? It depends on how you lot do the math. Either way, it'southward far less than half.
Initially when nosotros did this story, nosotros found that if y'all kickoff with the biggest-balloter-vote states, the answer is 27 per centum. However, nosotros have an update: every bit Andrej Schoeke very nicely pointed out to us on Twitter, in that location'southward some other way to do information technology (via CGP Grayness) 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 past our last math, in 2012 that could have meant winning the presidency with only around 23 pct of the popular vote.
The thought hither is that a voter in a low-population country like Wyoming counts for a larger share of balloter votes than pop votes.
And if one were to start with the largest states, it would be 27 percent. Hither's a look at that math:
We're making a lot of assumptions here — we're using vote totals from 2012, for i thing. Moreover, we're assuming in that location are only 2 candidates in the race.
And permit's be clear about the obvious here: This kind of an extreme ballot isn't going to happen. And if it did — if there were somehow a agglomeration of 1- or two-vote wins, you tin bet the recounts would stretch into 2017.
And we're as well sure that with any number of tweaks to the math (similar plugging in a third or 4th candidate), you could come up with results that are slightly-to-moderately different. But that's not actually the point hither. The signal is that the Electoral Higher can skew election results to a fantastic degree.
How a 7-point win becomes a "landslide"
This kind of popular-balloter 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 merely about 53 percent of the pop vote.
Skewed wins like this happen regularly in U.S. elections — a modest popular vote margin tin yield a ridiculously large Electoral College margin. For case, in 1984, Ronald Reagan beat out Walter Mondale in the pop vote past 18 points — a sizable gap, only aught like the Electoral Higher walloping: Reagan won 525 balloter 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 but squeaked past Richard Nixon in the popular vote by effectually 100,000 votes:
Ironically, the 2000 election — whose outcome struck many people as unfair because Gore won the pop vote but not the electoral vote — also has the electoral-vote margin that well-nigh 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 Balloter College and electric current demographics mean that both parties often have item 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 enough of piece of cake wins for each party at the depression end of the spectrum. Wyoming is regularly Republican. Hawaii regularly votes Autonomous.)
And that means that candidates regularly spend a asymmetric amount of time in loftier-electoral-vote battlefield 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 go that much attention.
If the Electoral Higher disappeared tomorrow, campaign strategy would probably shift dramatically; Democrats might entrada more in Austin, Texas. Republicans might exercise more outreach in conservative parts of California. Either manner, the people of Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania might get some respite from the onslaught of rallies and ads every 4 years, as candidates try harder to win bigger parts of the country.
*Before you fire off an e-mail, yeah, we know: You can still win the presidency without winning 270 electoral votes. If no candidate hits 270, then the House votes. But nosotros're talking outright on election night.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2016/11/02/500112248/how-to-win-the-presidency-with-27-percent-of-the-popular-vote
0 Response to "What States Do You Have to Win to Be President"
Postar um comentário