I became curious as to how the popular vote gap vs Electoral College gap played out and charted it, starting with FDR’s last election:
First, I should note that the subjects of third party candidates and faithless electors are treated here by ignoring them for charting purposes, and removing their numbers for calculation purposes. In other words, all calculations are carried out with only those numbers won by the top two finishers. That said, there’s a surprising number of both in just the 20 elections recorded here.
So is there anything to learn here? Generally, the Electoral College acts as a magnifier of popular vote gaps; the Trump/Clinton contest, and to a much lesser extent, the Bush/Gore contest, are not a trend, but outliers. But it’s worth concentrating on them nonetheless, because they are also evidence that the Electoral College, slanted as it is toward giving smaller states more power than larger states through the inclusion of a mandatory two votes plus those votes for all Representatives, which can also be unfair in favor of the least populated states, should be replaced by a direct vote.
As this chart doesn’t track either Parties or ideologies, it’s hard to say if the electorate is changing over time all that much. Certainly, Reagan’s two elections were blowouts, but that appears to have been the high point of the Republican Party, and I doubt that it’s rational to suggest the Republicans of today would even recognize the Republicans of the 1980s as more than distantly related cousins – if that. I suspect that there’d be little respect for Republican President Abraham Lincoln, either.
And it’s fair to say that the Democrats have been on a Presidential hot streak beginning with the Bill Clinton’s victory in 1992. Since then, only Kerry’s loss in 2004 was a “real” loss. Clinton, Gore, Obama, Hillary Clinton, and now Biden have had substantial showings, which should have resulted in at least seven terms of the Democrats holding the White House – and the 2004 contest might have also gone Democratic if Bush (II) had lost the Electoral College in 2000.
That dwarfs the three Republican terms of Reagan and Bush (I).
Does this reflect an ideological shift in America, or lower-quality candidates offered by the Republicans? Trump certainly rings the bell for the latter category, but Presidential elections are not just about ideology, but swirls of personal reactions, religion, and many other factors make this a difficult analysis.
And one that I shan’t continue.
So, I made the chart mostly for my own amusement. If you extract something from it, let me know.
