![]() Even with 52.0% of the popular vote, Obama loses the simulated 2012 Electoral College 3.36% of the time. Still, even with knowing the seemingly best estimation equation, the actual popular vote, and the state divisions during the previous election year, getting the Electoral College winner and popular vote winner to match has elements of a lottery. We replicate similarly benign results for earlier elections. The actual Electoral College division (332 Obama, 206 Romney) was near the center of the simulated outcomes. 1 2012, the state vote divisions in 2008, and the 2012 popular vote of 52.0% Barack Obama and 48.0% Mitt Romney. 2 B shows the retrospectively likely 2012 Electoral College division when using Eq. For elections leading up to 2016, the actual vote margins were well within the range of the after-the-fact simulated forecasts. 1 t, the distributions show the range of likely outcomes in the Electoral College. In other words, knowing the exact popular vote in election year t, the partisan division of states in election year t − 4, plus Eq. The simulated Electoral College outcomes are conditional on the actual national popular vote as explained above. 2 shows the simulations for the nine elections. The range of possible outcomes is sufficiently wide, however, to even include some possibility that Joseph Biden could win in the Electoral College while barely losing the popular vote.įig. Based on thousands of simulations, our research suggests that the bias in 2020 probably will favor Trump again but to a lesser degree than in 2016. We show that in past presidential elections, difference among states in their presidential voting is solely a function of the states’ most recent presidential voting (plus new shocks) earlier history does not matter. The potential Electoral College bias was slimmer in the past and not always favoring the Republican candidate. We note that 2016 was a statistical outlier. This paper shows how to forecast the electoral vote in 2020 taking into account the unknown popular vote and the configuration of state voting in 2016. Donald Trump’s 2016 win despite failing to carry the popular vote has raised concern that 2020 would also see a mismatch between the winner of the popular vote and the winner of the Electoral College.
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