WASHINGTON — With the Electoral College tallies this week, the 2020 presidential race is finally over, but Democrats and Republicans continue to argue about the results. And one debate in particular lingers: Did President-elect Joe Biden win by a little or did he win by a lot?
The answer is … yes, depending on how you measure the votes. And closer looks at this year’s election and past races show why the Electoral College/popular vote divide is increasingly worrying in a nation with a sharply divided political scene.
Let’s start with 2020. Looking at the popular vote, Biden has actually won by a sizable margin.
As we noted recently on the Data Download, Biden’s 4.5-point victory margin is the second largest since 2000. Only Barack Obama’s 2008 7-point win was bigger. The same is true of Biden’s margin of 7 million popular votes. Obama won by 10 million in 2008. And of course, the 81 million votes Biden won is by far the most any presidential candidate has ever received.
But if you look just at the states that put Biden over the top in the Electoral College, he actually won by fewer votes than Trump.
Throughout President Trump’s time in the White House, much has been made of how he actually won the presidency by under 78,000 votes in three states. And that point was true. Trump won because of narrow margins in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
But, in the end, the margins were even tighter for the three states that put Biden over the top in the Electoral College this year. He won Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin by a total of less than 45,000 votes.
The difference between the popular and Electoral College presidential votes has gotten a lot of attention lately. Democrats are usually more than happy to point out that Republican presidential candidates have won the popular vote exactly once since 1992, when George W. Bush won it in 2004. But the bigger concern is that the popular/electoral divide is growing.
Consider the 2000 election. That race that is well-remembered for coming down to a recount in Florida, but even outside of Florida, the election was extremely close. The overall national popular vote difference was 547,000, or just .51 percentage points. And there were eight states where the winning candidate’s margin was less than 3.5 percentage points.
Now compare that to 2020. Biden won the popular vote by 7 million and more than 4 points, but there were still eight states where the winning candidate’s margin was within 3.5 points.
In other words, a swing of a few thousand votes in a few states this year and the country could be looking at a second term for Trump, even though Biden would have won the national popular vote by 7 million votes. In a country where political divisions have grown more intense, that kind of divide between the popular and the institutional winners would be deeply problematic.
Does that mean the Electoral College may be on the way out? Don’t bet on it.
Remember that point about the Republican presidential candidate winning the popular vote only once since 1992. And then add this data point about 2020: Biden’s entire national popular vote margin, that 7-million vote edge comes from just two states: California and New York. That’s not a political reality Republicans are eager to inhabit.
So, for now the popular/electoral gap seems set to grow, driven in part by a an urban/rural split among voters. It means neither the Democrats nor the Republicans are likely to capture a mandate that would allow them to do what they want in a country that says it is hungry for change.
With a new year and a new president arriving soon, that seems to leave Washington with one meaningful, worthwhile resolution for next year, a more bipartisan 2021.
Easy? No. But the holidays are a time to dream.