Popular Vote Nightmare

According to this Politico graphic, Hillary won the popular vote by approximately 800,000 votes but Trump won convincingly with electoral votes.  This has happened several times in US history, most recently in 2000 when Al Gore won the popular vote (48.4% to 47.9%) but narrowly lost the electoral vote (271 to 266).  As I mentioned in a previous post, Hillary's margin in California (2.6 million votes) is more than triple the amount of her overall popular vote margin.  The margin in one state should determine who is president?  Let's game that out for a worst case scenario.

 

Using the numbers from the Politico graphic, let us assume that Candidate A wins all but two states by a margin of 100,000 votes each and that 3rd Parties drain away the same number of votes as they did this year.  Candidate A thus wins a narrow victory in a state like Texas (48.6% to 47.4%) but a tremendous landslide in a state like South Dakota (60.1% to 33.1%).  Candidate B spent all his time in California and Florida.  He won both states by the exact margin that Hillary won California (61.5% to 33.2%).  Using the Electoral College, Candidate A wins an electoral landslide of 454 to 84.  Using the popular vote, Candidate B wins with 60.3 million votes to 60 million votes.  Because California and Florida are two of the most populous states, Candidate B's margin of victory is more than 5 million votes in those two states.  The 100K margin in every other state and DC only adds up to 4.9 million votes.  In this worst case scenario, who do you think should win?

 

Here is something else of note.  Florida has a population of 20.3 million and cast 9.4 million votes.  California has a population of 39.1 million and cast 9.1 million votes.  Under a popular vote system, Florida had more of a say than a state that is nearly twice its size.  Florida voters provided 7.3% of the total votes while California only provided 7.1%.  Under the electoral college system, California represents 10.2% of the votes while Florida has 5.4%.

 

Clearly, the electoral college forces the presidential election to be national rather than regional and it balances out the states regardless of voter participation rates.