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Biden won the popular vote by over 6 million. But he won the electoral college by only 43,692 votes (less than Trump did in 2016)
- Thread starter Deleted member 31923
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The reason MI/PA are relevant is because they're swing states. If GA had gone to pubs it'd be like California going for dems: expected. Same for AZ.
If we were in a situation where PA/MI/WI were the only swing states flipped, Biden would've won and we'd be saying that he won critical states by far more than Trump did in 2016.
Georgia and Arizona weren't needed, and are extra. That's why I'm Focusing on PA/MI/WI. CA is one of the safest blue states in the country, it's disingenuous to compare it to PA and MI.
I never said they were one state.
Pretty much why winning the runoffs in Georgia are paramount. Without it we'll likely get 2 years of executive orders and then hope they can maybe flip the senate in 22.
OP
OP
This explains it. The House decides the tie, but not in the way you would typically think. Whoever controls more statehouses really decides it, and that's Republicans right now.
What happens if Trump and Biden tie in the Electoral College? | Brookings
If the Electoral College is tied, the president will be selected in the House, with each state having only one vote. Which party has the majority of each state's delegation will be key.
www.brookings.edu
Right, but it seems dicey to just group Wisconsin with the other two at this point, considering the margins between it and the other two. The whole point is that Wisconsin doesn't seem safe even though it's monolithed together with them as "the blue wall".
Not the way they are now, no. Theyd be forced to become more moderate if they even want a shot.
You can group GA with the other two. Or AZ with the other two.
I feel like the most likely situation for 22 is flipping the Senate and losing the more gerrymandered house. So, yeah, runoffs are pretty important.
You can if you want, but if all three are set to stay close, potentially even tossups, then democrats have work to do because that's not a reliable strategy. Why exactly is Wisconsin different to the other two to be that different in voting? That needs to be figured out.
Man the bad math (or lack of willingness to do maths at all) in this thread is killing me. The OP is 100% right.
The blue wall concept is confusing people. It makes no sense in grouping them together. Its not the same for Republicans and democrats. Democrats need all 3 to win republicans only need 1.
Think of it this way. Michigan and Pensilvania were as much bonuses in 2016 for the Republicans as Arizona and Georgia are for the democrats now.
Both years Wisconsin alone was the tipping point state.
The blue wall concept is confusing people. It makes no sense in grouping them together. Its not the same for Republicans and democrats. Democrats need all 3 to win republicans only need 1.
Think of it this way. Michigan and Pensilvania were as much bonuses in 2016 for the Republicans as Arizona and Georgia are for the democrats now.
Both years Wisconsin alone was the tipping point state.
If the NPVIC fails, that's fine too. It would mean the Supreme Court ruled that states are not in charge of their own elections.
People focus on the "compact" word and say it'd be knocked down on that basis. But each state can, constitutionally, assign their electors however they want. They can make it a fucking jump rope competition of they want to.
You make a lot of fair points, but how else do you propose dems win the Presidency + House + Senate at the same time? There's a chance in January, but after that, the road is pretty tough.
Which is why Pelosi was saying this in August
Pelosi tells fellow Democrats 'it's all riding on Wisconsin'
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and former Attorney General Eric Holder are delivering a stark message to Wisconsin Democrats about what role the key battleground state will have in the presidential election
abcnews.go.com
It's simple; it's propaganda dressed up in a veneer of math. This claim has been circulating in right wing media for weeks to delegitimize Biden's victory or soothe themselves. OP picked it up and posted it here as an original analysis. I'll give OP the benefit of the doubt, and assume they heard this argument and are genuinely concerned about the disparity in the EC, as opposed to concern trolling.
For example, this 11/8 piece from the Federalist contains this argument exactly:
Geez, when the Republican wins, Republicans scream how it's a landslide. When the Democrat wins, Democrats try to find ways to lessen the impact of the win.
2016 Trump won because of a decrease in Dem turn out in battle ground states was down.
Biden won in 2020 by beating a guy who increased his turnout from 2016.
All the more impressive
Biden won in 2020 by beating a guy who increased his turnout from 2016.
All the more impressive
Take the closest number of wins that would have been required for Trump to win. Sum the vote difference in these states.
OP
OP
I certainly don't read the Federalist and didn't pick it up from right wing sources. I saw it posted here in another thread and hadn't thought of it that way before then. Maybe I can find the thread, but no one here had a problem when it was presented previously that I remember.
Well, funny enough, I do think that some of your ideas will help... long term. Like, re-empowering unions is both the right policy move and a very good way to create new organizing infrastructure for us. Taking on big tech can help combat the spread of misinformation and improve the public consciousness.
But mostly we have to focus on making government work again in the tiny windows we have power, and when we don't, we push the envelope as far as we can, as publicly as we can. We need make big, progressive changes that demonstrate to our base and anybody hanging on the sidelines that when the Republicans tell you that government is useless and both parties are the same, they're lying. We also need a new VRA, to combat Republican voter suppression efforts. Those two things are worth at least 5-10% of the WWC, and we don't have to tie ourselves in knots trying to appeal to them specifically, when so much of what makes that appeal work is the exclusionary nature of it. And hell, if it starts to peel off the WWC along the way? So much the better. Toss DC statehood on top and our odds of controlling all three branches goes up a lot.
Yeah but they weren't.
Arizona and Georgia weren't any more comfortable red in 2020, than Michigan and Pennsylvania were comfortably blue in 2016. Even if the perception before the election is these are comfortably safe states, if you lose them, then they're not.
Biden won Nebraska 2 by 7%, though. By about 11pm on election night we knew we couldn't have a 269/269 tie.
So, sure, if Biden doesn't win Wisconsin, if he doesn't win Georgia, if he doesn't win Arizona, if he doesn't win Nebraska 2, then it's a 269/269 tie and it gets thrown to the House Delegations, where Republicans held a +1 state delegate majority, and the House selects the guy who lost by about 6million votes.
It just seems like weird selection when we knew that if Biden could flip PA, MI, and WI back from red to blue, that he'd have 278 E.C. votes, and anything on top of that -- Nebraska 2, AZ, and GA, would be nice. To focus solely on AZ and Georgia in exchange of Michigan and PA (or that MN is a larger margin, or any other number of states), to draw up that 2020 is a closer election than 2016 seems spurious.
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So, basically, we are hostage of this Electoral College system.
I was reading a book that if civil disobedience exceeds a percentage of 2-3% of a population, change is inevitable.
So, we basically need 6-9M people in the streets and then we can throw this system away, right?
I was reading a book that if civil disobedience exceeds a percentage of 2-3% of a population, change is inevitable.
So, we basically need 6-9M people in the streets and then we can throw this system away, right?
OP
OP
It's a 269 tie with Biden winning Nebraska 2 actually (minus Wisconsin, Arizona, and Georgia for Biden). Recall that Trump won Maine 2 and offset the Nebraska win.
A 269-269 tie still would have happened with Biden winning NE-02 and losing the closest states of WI, AZ and GA. The reason why we "knew" it wouldn't happen on election night was because AZ (which ended up being the closest race by total # of votes) was called for Biden prematurely.
Again, Michigan and PA were not decisive states in this election. They swung back comfortably for Biden but Trump still would have won without them if not for Biden eking out wins in AZ and GA.
I think what people seem to be missing is that Biden needed ALL THREE of MI, WI and PA if he didn't flip any other Trump states. He ended up getting all three, but one of them (WI) was extremely close. If he had not managed to swing WI then his margin of victory in MI and PA would not have mattered as AZ or GA would have been the tipping point state..
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Sorry dude its not propaganda its reality. Anyone with a grasp elementary school level math and an electoral college map would come to the same conclusion. Like seriously everyone in this thread please just go do that. The wilful ignorance is killing me.
this is only true if you ignore literally every single other elected office in the nation besides president
Here's another way to look at it:
In 2016, Trump got to 259 electoral votes fairly comfortably. After that, he needed 11 to win outright (ignoring the possibility of faithless electors). For that, he ended up needing one of these:
In 2020, Biden got to 269 electoral votes fairly comfortably. After that, he needed 1 to win outright. For that, he ended up needing one of these:
Biden's electoral college outright win was slightly closer by any metric, and his first "backup" win was closer as well. Given the popular vote totals in both election, that is certainly frustrating.
However, the fact that Biden made it to 269 fairly comfortably could also be important. Any change to the state allocations of House seats that nets one more in a safely Democratic state would put the "safe" Biden states at 270. A shift of 3 would mean the ME and NE split votes are no longer needed.
Anyone know the likely impact yet of the 2020 census on the House allocation?
In 2016, Trump got to 259 electoral votes fairly comfortably. After that, he needed 11 to win outright (ignoring the possibility of faithless electors). For that, he ended up needing one of these:
- PA - he won by 44k (0.7%)
- WI + NE-2 - he won by a combined 29k (0.8% in WI)
- MI - he won by 11k (0.2%)
In 2020, Biden got to 269 electoral votes fairly comfortably. After that, he needed 1 to win outright. For that, he ended up needing one of these:
- WI - he won by 21k (0.6%)
- GA - he won by 13k (0.3%)
- AZ - he won by 10k (0.3%)
Biden's electoral college outright win was slightly closer by any metric, and his first "backup" win was closer as well. Given the popular vote totals in both election, that is certainly frustrating.
However, the fact that Biden made it to 269 fairly comfortably could also be important. Any change to the state allocations of House seats that nets one more in a safely Democratic state would put the "safe" Biden states at 270. A shift of 3 would mean the ME and NE split votes are no longer needed.
Anyone know the likely impact yet of the 2020 census on the House allocation?
Because in 2016 and 2020, 3 states decided by less than 1% determined the winner and loser of the election.
I would argue that the senate is much worse, its certainly far less representative. The house is pretty bad as well with gerrymandering.
That's what I meant to say, must have omitted WI by accident. The point still stands, Trump didn't need MI or PA to win.
That was the minimum number of states needed to change the outcome of the election.
After reading this thread the last two pages made it very clear why the OP is wrong. There was mostly good follow-up discussion all around.
Agreed with you both.
I think you're just reading an intent that isn't there. It's not about intending to show Biden underperforming, or Biden's win being unimpressive, at all: it's about how, due to how the Electoral College works, the margins in swing states benefit Republicans more than Democrats, and how that might continue to be a serious problem going forward.
The OP's logic is sound, IMO, and it's not "doomposting" at all.
Yes, exactly! That's a really good way to express it.
"It's all about Wisconsin", indeed. And considering Biden's margin there is razor-thin (20k votes... the Libertarian candidate got 38k, lmao), that means it is NOT a reliably blue state anymore, and we will still sweat bullets on November 2024.
The amount of states is irrelevant, it's the minimum amount of votes that would have to change to change the results, In this case it's Biden's margin in those three states that would have been the shortest path to a Trump victory.
The EC has a fair amount of problems, but I'm not sure this is the best analysis on the topic. AZ, GA, and WI were brought as examples of how much Biden won by, but that seems uncharitable. He could've won if he won literally any of those three states in this scenario, but to lose all three was highly unlikely. The same winds that lifted Biden across the US lifted him in these states.
Compare Biden's MOV in other key states to 2016, and the story is much different.
EDIT: for example, since in this scenario he only needed to win one of those three states, I selected WI as the only one he won and said that the MOV in Wisconsin was the same nationwide. The margin was 0.7%. If you compare this on the whole vote, he won the popular vote by 1.1M, which is surely a lot more than the actual number he won WI by.
The first and second examples of why the EC sucks are 2000 and 2016, and literally nothing else needs to be said.
Compare Biden's MOV in other key states to 2016, and the story is much different.
EDIT: for example, since in this scenario he only needed to win one of those three states, I selected WI as the only one he won and said that the MOV in Wisconsin was the same nationwide. The margin was 0.7%. If you compare this on the whole vote, he won the popular vote by 1.1M, which is surely a lot more than the actual number he won WI by.
The first and second examples of why the EC sucks are 2000 and 2016, and literally nothing else needs to be said.
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So I'm no math wizard here but I have been pouring over E.C. maps obsessively for about 20 years, and this argument generally boils down to "Well, if you pretend that Biden didn't win Pennsylvania and Michigan, then this election is actually a tie," and it's like, oh, ok, but Biden did win Pennsylvania and Michigan, and by wider margins than Trump did in 2016... "Yeah but pretend that he didn't and it's a tie." Oh, ok.
It's like Biden is being punished by the conclusions in the OP for winning Georgia and Arizona. Georgia, a state that no Democrat has won since 1992 and that Clinton only won in 1992 because 13% of Republicans in Georgia voted for Ross Perot. And Arizona, a state that no Democrat has won since 1952. No, you don't get punished in the narrative game for narrowly winning states.
Nobody is going to look at the 2020 election and say that it was a historic blowout, even though Trump himself has said that 2016 was a historic blowout (an election that he won, incidentally, by exactly the same numbers he lost in 2020, and by some 3million more people who voted against him), but we all know that Trump is an idiot and no thinking humans think this was some historic landslide. But the general argument in the OP that keeps getting repeated is that if you take away states from Biden and pretend they're not important, and just focus on these historic flips that no Democrat has won since before color television, then the election is a tie, which Trump wins. And I don't really know where to go with that.
The accurate summation for 2020, relative to 2016 is, "This was a close election that turned on only a few hundred thousand votes, but a wider victory for Biden than 2016 was for Trump."
Most are parliamentary federal systems where there is no separate election for president or the role of the president is ceremonial. The leader of the government is usually the prime minister which as I've explaiend above is based on a seat count allocated in such a way that, like electors, also benefit smaller states/provinces in the union.
In Canada there's even a strange arrangement where one province gets special treatment such that regardless of population changes they always get 25% of the seats. Imagine a US state getting that. All federal system have its quirks,
I do think assigning electors by popular vote split in each state instea of winner take all will solve the problem, but it will still occasionally produce a result where the party that gets the majority of the vote still lose. It happens in parliamentary systems too.
OP's point isn't wrong regardless of framing people want to argue about. The fact is, democratic voters are very poorly distributed wrt the electoral college. Of course, that really comes down to the fact that the more rural a state is, the more republican it is and we got a lot of empty land states. Or, really, our electoral system and the Senate are complete shit.