When Hillary Clinton was leading Donald Trump by 7 or 8 percentage points nationally, her Electoral College map seemed expansive. States like Virginia and Colorado were out of Trump’s reach. South Carolina and Georgia seemed competitive. Even a Clinton win in Texas seemed less like a fever dream and more like just an optimistic projection. The map seemed like Clinton’s friend.
But Trump’s chances have been on an upswing the last couple of weeks and rose again Thursday on strong national and state polling. He now trails by only a couple of percentage points. And the tighter the race gets, the less favorable the map looks for Clinton. Indeed, Clinton does not have a meaningful advantage in the Electoral College, as President Obama did in 2012.
Four years ago, Obama defeated Mitt Romney by 3.9 percentage points. But even if the national popular vote had been closer, Obama had a pretty big cushion in the Electoral College. Let’s say the race had been 3.9 percentage points closer and Obama and Romney had tied in the popular vote. So let’s make every state 3.9 points more Republican-leaning. Obama won Pennsylvania, for example, by 5.4 points. After our adjustment, he wins by only 1.5 points. Georgia would go from a 7.8-point Romney win to an 11.7-point one. And so on. If we do this in every state, we find that Obama would still have carried enough states to win the White House. With 272 electoral votes. If you were to continue to take points away from Obama in the popular vote margin and adjust the state margins accordingly, you’d find that he would have had to lose nationally by 1.5 percentage points to lose the Electoral College.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member