Popular vote and electoral college

August 7th, 2008, by Andrew

Here’s a picture from my paper with Jonathan and Gary a few years ago that appeared in the volume Rethinking the Vote, but it’s actually a graph that Gary and I made around 1994 or so. The graph shows the share of the two-party popular vote that the Democrats needed to have a 5%, 50%, or 95% chance of winning the electoral college in each year:

In most years, things were pretty balanced (each party has some close states and some not-so-close states, each party wins some big states and some small states). We haven’t done 2008 but I suspect it would be similar. That’s the conclusion of this paper by Phillip Ardoin and Bryan Parsons:

Our [Ardoin and Parsons's] research provides a direct analysis of the multiple sources of bias within the electoral college and examines their individual impact on each party’s electoral fortunes over the last eleven elections (1964-2004) with particular attention on the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections. Our results are in line with previous analyses indicating no significant bias within the electoral college.

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Entry Filed under: Elections