Admiral Beez
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@Jasmine18 Yep.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/12/opinion/electoral-college-2020.html?referringSource=articleShare
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/12/opinion/electoral-college-2020.html?referringSource=articleShare
Donald Trump commands a remarkable level of support from virtually every elected official in his party and almost all voters likely to vote for his party. In this respect, he stands alone among presidents in modern history. The question arises: Why shouldn’t he try to hold that base, drive his approval rating high above 50 percent and win a big national victory in November 2020?
The answer is that in this century the Electoral College system strongly encourages candidates of both parties, and particularly any Republican candidate, to ignore the national popular vote. That’s especially true for President Trump: The system rewards him for focusing on a handful of states, located mostly in the Great Lakes region, with policies, promises and programs that may not resonate or even be consistent with the interests of all Americans.
To uncover statistical proof of this incentive, our nonprofit Making Every Vote Count built a model of the upcoming election based on the history of voting in previous elections in the modern era. Our conclusion is that even if the general population prefers the Democratic nominee by much more than was the case in 2016, Mr. Trump has almost a one-third chance of winning the Electoral College while ignoring the national vote but only about a one-fifth chance of winning the national popular vote as a route to winning the Electoral College.
With those odds, any rational strategist would tell Mr. Trump to campaign for victory in the swing states that hold the electors necessary to get to the magic 270 number, even if the message, the visits and the focus might turn off voters in the rest of the country. This sort of campaign and this type of presidency might not be best for the economy or society as a whole. But it is the way to win.
Specifically, we assumed that the national preference for the Democrats went from the two percentage points popular vote margin won by Hillary Clinton in the November 2016 election to a 7 percentage points margin. On average, that general approval rating for the Democratic nominee would translate to a eight to nine million vote victory for the Democratic nominee in November 2020. We chose it to test our hypothesis.
With such a high approval rating, the Democratic nominee would probably win the national popular vote. But that is not guaranteed. The first reason general approval might not match actual voting results is that only a little more than half of the electorate turns out to vote for president.
In the five elections in this century, participation ranged between 54 percent and 62 percent of the eligible voting population. There are many reasons for this: Some states make early voting easy, some make mail ballots widely available, some have many voting places and others few, weather can be inviting or keep people at home, registration can be an issue, and so forth. However, a huge factor is that the Electoral College system leads both parties to abandon campaigning in as many as 40 states — containing more than 80 percent of eligible voters — soon after Labor Day.
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