12/29/2023 0 Comments Popular vote totals for 2016 election![]() ![]() Interestingly, this is a long-run property, not a modern phenomenon. ![]() This jumps to 45% of elections decided by 1 percentage point or less (about 2.6 million votes by the 2016 turnout). ![]() The popular vote winner will lose 32% of elections decided by 2 percentage points or less (1.3 million votes by the 2016 turnout). Our analysis shows that inversions are surprisingly likely, especially in close elections. Instead, either party is likely to win an inversion in a close election. But there is nothing special about winning a majority of the votes – there is no jump in probabilities at 50%. Unsurprisingly, the curve slopes upwards, which means that Republicans are more likely to win the presidency when they receive more votes. In other words, we ask what the probability of an inversion is if the Republican wins the popular vote by 2 percentage points, or by 1 percentage point, or if he or she loses by 3 points or any other number. We calculate the probability of an inversion for each potential national popular vote outcome, tracing a function that describes these probabilities. Electoral College inversions have been very likely since the 1800s…įigure 1a Modern: Electoral College victory probability As a result, we can show that our main conclusions hold no matter what statistical model you think best explains voting patterns in presidential elections. 2004), recent advances in election forecasting (Silver, 2016), as well as other non-parametric approaches. Our statistical model is flexible enough to nest the standard approaches to election modelling from the positive political science literature (Gelman and King 1994, and Katz et al. Using this process, we generate many simulated elections to produce a joint probability distribution over the national popular vote and the national Electoral College outcome. Aggregating across the states yields a probable national election outcome in terms of citizen votes and Electoral College ballots. Sampling from the estimated model yields probable outcomes for each state’s vote tally. We estimate the models using state-level voting data in presidential races extending back to 1836. We specify election models aimed at generating probability distributions over national elections in various historical periods. 2019) we study three eras of US politics from the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, from contests between Whigs and Democrats before the Civil War to today’s Republicans and Democrats. Was it a fluke that the Electoral College generated four inversions in the last two centuries? Could there have been even more? Are inversions baked into the Electoral College system, or do they depend on the particular candidates or parties? The same types of election models used to forecast presidential races can be cast backwards over the centuries Just before the 2016 election, for example, predicted an 11% chance of an inversion (Silver 2016).īut what has been unclear until now is how often we should expect these electoral inversions. They predict results of particular elections, such as Trump versus Clinton in 2016 in the weeks before voters’ ballots are cast. Just how likely are inversions?Īll of this attention to electoral inversions raises a question: how likely is an inversion? Data journalists and election forecasters have applied increasingly sophisticated statistical tools to analysing politics. Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and several other Democratic candidates for the 2020 nomination have openly called for the end of electoral voting – and therefore the end of inversions. These proposals are possibly more politically viable today than ever. Practical proposals to repeal the Electoral College system – including over a hundred constitutional amendments proposed by members of Congress over the past two centuries – are often predicated on the belief that inversions are probable enough to warrant major constitutional change (Edwards 2011, Peirce and Longley 1968). There have been four times when the winner of the presidency did not receive the most votes: 1876, 1888, 2000, and 2016. An inversion in the Electoral College happens when the candidate who wins the popular vote is not the candidate who wins the presidency. Today, the Electoral College amounts to a set of mathematical rules that transform the country’s votes into a presidential winner.Īs the world now knows, these rules can yield a surprising result. But the voters do not elect the president, that is done by the Electoral College. Every four years, voters in the US vote for a president. ![]()
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