Is the Republican advantage in the Electoral College diminishing?
By Given the broad nature of the current political coalitions, the large Republican edge in the Senate is essentially immutable. But the Electoral College is other matter — John Kerry was 120,000 votes in Ohio from winning the Electoral College with a substantial popular vote loss in 2004, and Barack Obama had more efficient Electoral College coalitions both times. This will not happen again in 2024, but there is some evidence that the Republican advantage is shrinking:
Ever since Donald J. Trump’s stunning victory in 2016 — when he lost the popular vote by almost three million votes but still triumphed with over 300 electoral votes — many who follow politics have believed Republicans hold an intractable advantage in the Electoral College.
But there’s growing evidence to support a surprising possibility: His once formidable advantage in the Electoral College is not as ironclad as many presumed. Instead, it might be shrinking.
According to The New York Times’s polling average, it does not seem that Kamala Harris will necessarily need to win the popular vote by much to prevail.
The simplest way to measure the advantage in the Electoral College is to take the difference between the national popular vote and the vote in the “tipping-point” state (the state that puts one candidate over the top in the Electoral College). Right now, Vice President Harris leads the polling in the national vote by 2.6 percentage points, and leads Wisconsin — the current tipping-point state — by 1.8 points, which makes Mr. Trump’s advantage less than a point.
By this measure, Mr. Trump’s advantage is only around one-fifth as large as it was four years ago, when President Biden fared 3.8 points better nationally than in Wisconsin (the tipping-point state in 2020).
The key difference at this point is that Trump is doing better in some noncompetitive states (most notably New York ), reducing the “wasted vote” disadvantage Clinton and Biden got by winning California and New York by such huge margins. Polls are not results, needless to say, but if Trump’s tipping point edge is even somewhere in the 1.5% range I would feel a lot better about Harris’s chances of winning.