Today is the day after Labor Day in the US and traditionally it is seen as the start of the race for the elections to be held in November. This is, of course, laughable because in the US we have effectively a permanent election season, but the conceit is that other than political junkies, most people do not pay much attention to politics until after Labor Day. How true this is is anybody’s guess.
Another curious feature of US politics that can be bewildering to those outside the US (and even to many in the US) is the electoral college system that is used to decide who the presidential winner is. Each state is assigned a number of electoral college votes made up of two (for the two senators) plus the number of congressional seats it has. So Michigan, which has 13 congressional districts, has 15 electoral college votes. Washington DC is not a state but it has been assigned three electoral college votes as if it were a state with just one congressional district. So the total number of electoral college votes is 538: 100 (for the total number of senators) plus 435 (for the total number of congressional districts) plus 3 (for Washington DC). Hence a candidate needs 270 electoral college votes to win. In 2020, Biden defeated creepy Trump 306-232. This need not correlate with winning the popular vote nationwide. In 2000 and 2016, George W. Bush and creepy Donald Trump won the presidency despite losing the popular vote.
Almost all states assign all their electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote in that state. The two exceptions are Nebraska and Maine. Each has two congressional districts and hence four votes total. The winner of each district gets that vote plus the overall winner in the state gets the remaining two votes. So the state’s vote can be 4-0 or 3-1. In 2020, Maine went 3-1 for Biden while Nebraska went 3-1 for creepy Trump.
Because so many states seem to be assured of going for one party, only those so-called ‘swing states’ that are very close in the polls are considered to matter. It is these that determine the final outcome of the presidential race, since the results of all the other states are assumed to be foregone conclusions. These swing states states have changed over time but currently there are seven, listed here along with their associated electoral votes: Michigan (15), Pennsylvania (19), Wisconsin (10), Arizona (11), Nevada (6), Georgia (16), and North Carolina (16). So of the 538 electoral college votes, it is just these 93 votes that all the attention is focused on. In each election, each party tries to ‘expand the map’ by trying to get states that were formerly assured for the other party to vote for them, if they think the margins are close.
Of the other 445 electoral college votes, 226 votes are expected to go to the Democratic candidate and 219 to the Republican. So Democrats need to win 44 of the 93 votes to gain the presidency, while Republicans need 51. This article reviews what the latest polls say in each of these swing states.
Labor Day is a critical mile-marker on the road to the general election, and Kamala Harris has reached it with a slim advantage over Donald Trump. But the former president would still be well within striking distance if the election were held today.
Because of Republicans’ advantage in the Electoral College, a race that Harris leads nationally by between 2 and 4 percentage points, on average, is the equivalent of a knife fight in a phone booth, and it’s set to be decided in a smaller-than-usual number of states.
The polls are extraordinarily tight in all of them, and that isn’t expected to change much over the next nine weeks. In modern presidential elections, where the race stands on Labor Day is usually pretty close to where it ends up once the votes are counted.
Of the seven states that both campaigns have identified as the core Electoral College battlegrounds, Harris leads Trump in three of them — the “Blue Wall” states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — according to multiple polling averages. But those leads are small: In only one state, Wisconsin, does an average show a greater than 3-point margin for the vice president.
In three others — Arizona, Georgia and Nevada — the polls are so close that different polling averages have different leaders as of Sunday night.
Only in the remaining swing state — North Carolina, which Trump won in both 2016 and 2020 — does the former president lead in all three polling averages: FiveThirtyEight, RealClearPolitics and Silver Bulletin, the new data-journalism site from FiveThirtyEight founder Nate Silver. But that lead is only around 1 point.
The article goes on to compare the polling averages for each state posted by different sites. These can be different because each site uses different metrics for inclusion in their averages: which polls to include, whether they are of registered voters or likely voters, the sizes of the samples, the sampling techniques, and so on. These result in what are called ‘house effects’ that result in different outcomes although they all purport to measure the same thing. Some house effects give better numbers for Republicans, others for Democrats, so one has to be wary of placing too much faith in any one. For example, Real Clear Politics is a right wing site and its averages are almost always better for Republicans than other averages. I tend to look at that site to get a sense of what a bad-case scenario might be.
The results given in the article can be used as benchmarks to compare with as we approach election day. The odd thing is that the article says that the final numbers usually end up being close to what they are on this day, which might suggest that all the increasingly frenetic activity that we will see in the next two months do not change things much. Maybe, contrary to conventional wisdom, people have been paying attention and their minds are already made up, and that the effect of political campaigning from now until election day is to keep their supporters within the fold and get them to vote, rather than bringing in new people.
I think it’s a mistake to speak of voters as if they all think the same. Some people have been paying attention for years, some for months or weeks, and some will decide this week or next month or in the voting booth.
Many decisions will be proportional to the ones so far. But it isn’t guaranteed.
David Baddiel Tries To Understand did an episode about US elections which is worth listening to if you can find a way to access it.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b07m7lmk
(He also does one on the
rulesLaws of Rugby Union, to go back to a subject from long ago https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b07mxv60).Each state is assigned a number of electoral college votes made up of two (for the two senators) plus the number of congressional seats it has.
Nitpickery: technically, the Senate is part of Congress, so each state gets as many votes as it has congressional seats, for the two senators and however many House members.
The custom of awarding all electoral votes to the majority (or plurality) winner apparently came about due to machinations of state legislatures. If a state has a clear majority for one party, that party typically controls the legislature and can strengthen its national counterpart by not letting any e-votes go the other way; a swing state can get a lot more political leverage by luring candidates to win the whole pot of, say, 11 e-votes rather than ending with 6-5 or 5-6.
No counter-incentives seem to exist at the state legislative level to do things more fairly. The swing states “benefit” from the current system by having national parties spend lavishly on advertising; perhaps as campaigns move more towards online spending (rather than radio/tv, newspapers, billboards, etc) that dynamic may change. (But the prospect of extracting more promises of federal spending for a given state would remain, and remain powerful.)
We really really really need a constitutional amendment for direct election of presidents & VPs by a national ranked-choice/top 5 system (any structure simply giving the prize to the top vote-winner would reward whichever party could split the other parties’ votes more, inviting spoilers, provocateurs, and general mischief).
I’m waiting to see what happens to the polls, if anything, after the debate a week from now. If nothing much changes in the next couple of weeks, then “a knife fight in a phone booth” might be an apt description of US presidential politics for the next two months. We’ll see…
This archaic system with the electoral college remains because the bosses find it benefits them. Rather like the ‘rotten boroughs’ in Britain before the 19th century.
The archaic electoral system was written in a time when horses were the primary mode of transportation, and it took a month for all the voting districts to tally the results and get them delivered to the State Capitol for verification.
It’s written into the Constitution, which makes it very difficult to change without overwhelming consensus.
Harris is smart to focus her efforts in the so called swing states, but I doubt the pollsters have yet to figure out why their models have failed to predict the outcome of the election since 2016.
I hope they also focus on places like Florida and Texas, which have large populations, and some of the Midwest states like Iowa, Nebraska, the Dakotas, etc…
I predict that the electoral map of America is going to be very purple after Election Day. The weirdos seem to be doing their best to alienate the vast majority of the population, and his base keeps defecting from the cult.
I don’t recall any election where a large percentage of prominent Republicans campaigned for and endorsed the Democratic candidates.
Please end this madness: may the National Popular Vote Initiative be successful soon!
That’s a bunch of states banding together, and, as soon as the sum of their electoral votes reaches 270, will change how their electors vote. The electors will have to vote for whoever wins the *national* popular vote, not the state vote. And since they’ll have at least 270, for the first time, the presidential election will be decided by national vote.
They have 209 electoral votes so far, and the initative is on the ballot or in front of the legislature or otherwise being considered in quite a few more states.
Please happen soon!!
Gen Z: “What’s a phone booth?”
@8: “phone booth” is an American term for something like a police box, but it’s not a TARDIS, and it’s no bigger on the inside than on the outside. Inside the booth, there’s just a telephone that one can use after depositing some coins.
Polling is better at detecting trends in public opinions than at detecting the actual current state of them or predicting the outcome on election day. Polling from multiple sources showed the gap between Hillary Clinton’s support and Trump’s support diminishing from the moment Comey announced his investigation. Polling from multiple sources showed a shift in the 2024presidential race from the time Biden withdrew from it.
The polls look dire. 538’s model gives less than 3 in 5 odds that “the world keeps spinning” wins the election against “watch the world burn”, and it is slipping.
On the other hand, Lichtman is optimistic: https://www.dajv.de/election-campaign/diy-guide-presidential-election-13-keys-to-the-white-house-2024-by-allan-lichtman-final-prediction/
Basically, as long as nothing blows up the economy before November, and especially if there’s a Gaza ceasefire or a major improvement in Ukraine (such as smashing Russian supply lines), Lichtman thinks Harris has it in the bag.
Me, I tend toward cautious pessimism in these things, especially after 2016.
BTW ‘Late Night’ with Seth Meyers brings up the latest weird speech by # 45.
@ 2 sonofrojblake
Those links play for me in Australia.
@ 9 billseymour
What are “coins”?
@ 14 Silentbob
Geez, Gen Z, you know this! It’s those yellow things which float in the air and pop out of [?] blocks in Mario.
Bekenstein Bound@11,
There are reasons for being somewhat more optimistic than polls suggest: Harris seems to have more money and more volunteers, due to the surge in enthusiasm that followed her replacing Biden. (The recent apparent slight shift toward Trump could be due to the fading of the slight post-convention bump Harris got, andor Kennedy’s suspension of his campaign and endorsement of Trump.) Also Harris clearly has more energy to campaign, what with Trump being so old and decrepit (he also shows clear signs of cognitive deficits, but the media do their best to hide that, and in any case it doesn’t seem to matter to his supporters). But there’s still plenty of time for surprise developments which could shift things either way.
Incidentally, the undemocratic nature of the electoral college and the fact that de facto only a few “swing states” decide the outcome have fairly close parallels in the UK: victory is decided by the number of constituencies parties win, not the total number of votes*; each constituency is decided on the same basis as the states in the USA, with the candidate getting more votes than any other winning it, and usually there are only a relatively small number of seats that change party -- although many did so in this year’s election. A difference is that the boundaries of seats may change to keep the sizes of constituency. electorates from varying too much. Also, the dominance of the two main parties has diminished (in a non-monotonic fashion) from its peak in 1951, when between them they won over 96% of the votes and 616 of the 625 seats, to the most recent election, in which they won less than 58% of the vote and only 532 of the 650 seats.
*In the 1951 general election, Labour won more votes (48.8% of the total -- no party has got such a large proportion in any general election since), but the Tories won an absolute majority of seats. Conversely, in the February 1974 election, Labour got slightly fewer votes than the Tories, but a few more seats -- although not an overall majority -- and managed to form a minority government, call a fresh election in October of the same year, and win a slim overall majority of seats.
A lot of the issues with the U.S. electoral system are a combination of a number of factors:
-- Much of it was written into the Constitution two centuries ago, making it difficult to change even though the world has changed since then
-- The U.S. Constitution was very much a prototype, with some things that nobody had ever done before at the time, and other countries’ constitutions have learned lessons of what works and what doesn’t from it.
-- The original concept of the U.S.A. was also much more of a ‘federation’, with each state being mostly independent: in some ways more like the modern E.U. than the modern U.S. A lot of the mess of how elections get held is a holdover from this otherwise-abandoned design.
-- U.S. elections are complicated because everything from municipal to federal level are voted on at the same time, including some positions like judges which aren’t elected in most countries. (In Canada, federal, provincial, and municipal elections are all on different days.)
-- The people who are winning elections have every reason to fight against any attempt at fixing any of the problems.
Gerrymandering is essentially a combination of ‘federation’ and ‘fighting against any fixes’: since states can still set their own rules of how to run elections in many ways, parties can push the rules in their favour as long as they don’t get enough pushback to stop them.
I’ve mentioned it before, but there’s a reason why Canada has a separate non-partisan department solely to run the elections and handle drawing of the riding boundaries, and has had for about a century. Good luck getting something like that set up in the U.S. with current politics, though.
@KG:
We have an interesting case of that in Canada which I know has at least some counterparts in the UK as well: regional parties. In particular, one of the main federal parties in Canada is the Bloc Québécois, which only operates in the Province of Quebec. As a result they have a massively outsized influence in Parliament compared to their share of the popular vote, because it’s so concentrated. Indeed, once they were even technically “Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition”, much to various snarky comments about how a fundamentally separatist party could be considered ‘loyal’ in any way. Imagine the fits that would be thrown if the SNP had the second largest set of seats at Westminster.
(Checking stats… hunh, apparently the SNP is fourth in the Commons, but if you add the Lords and Commons together they slip to fifth and the Democratic Unionists take fourth. That said, there’s a pretty massive cliff in counts between third and fourth.)
Our Conservative party has also become more regional as it slipped further rightward over the last couple of generations.
jenorafeuer@17:
I remember that. I woke up the morning after the election to the radio (which was my alarm then) singing, to the tune of Monster Mash, “It was the Bloc … the Bloc Quebecois!”
Not the only time my first coherent thought after waking up was “what the fuck?”, but one of the most notable such.
Slipped? It was dragged kicking and screaming by Reform, right around the same time as “It was the Bloc!” Which only happened because of the vote splitting on the right.
Some similar shit is happening now in the BC provincial politics, except there it’s the Tories taking over the Liberals rather than the further-right Reform taking over the Tories, with the NDP as the leftmost electable party rather than the Liberals. Same shit, different Overton window.
jenorafeuer@17,
Until the recent election, the SNP were the third largest party in the Commons -- like the Parti Quebecois, their vote is highly concentrated. However, they had a disastrous election, following a financial scandal and two changes of leader, while the Liberal Democrats, who are now third, had a very good one (despite not winning many more votes). In Scotland we usually have UK, Scottish Parliament and local elections on different days -- just as well, because they all run under different rules (FPTP at UK level, a “Mixed Member System” called modified d’Hondt for Holyrood ( the Scottish Parliament), Single Transferable Vote in multi-member constituencies for local elections) and the only time (IIRC) we had Scottish and local elections on the same day, there was a lot of confusion. Moreover, the electorate is smaller for UK than for Scotland-only elections, which allow 16 and 17 year-olds to vote as well as more non-citizen residents. We might end up having a Holyrood election early next year, I think, as the SNP government is now a minority one, and has seriously pissed off the Scottish Greens (of which I’m a member) on whose MSPs it relied to pass its last few budgets. I haven’t been able to discover what happens if no budget is passed!
If it’s anything like most parliamentary systems, it counts as a failed confidence vote and a new election is held, with the government in caretaker mode until its successor takes power.
To get anything like a government shutdown (normally more American than baseball and apple pie!) would take not only a budget failing to pass, but a gridlocked post-election parliament unable to form a governing coalition. At that point, there’s usually someone who can step in (often nominally tied to the normally-figurehead monarchy, or else a president in a mixed system) and govern by executive order while parliament gets its ducks in a row. In Canada we have the governor general and provincial counterparts for that (normally all they do is rubber-stamp key events in the election cycle, like the writ’s been dropped or a nascent government has survived the vote on its throne speech); in Weimar Germany the president had that role (which is how Hindenberg was fatefully able to basically appoint Hitler chancellor, thus dooming Weimar Germany and roughly 60 million people, after the Reichstag got deadlocked). So if it gets that bad yeah, it’s a crisis.
The US Constitution was not a prototype. Much of its emphasis on human rights and religious freedom come from Cyrus the Great (500s BC) and the Cyropedia.
A book written by Xenophon (born 431 BC) which romanticized the Persian Empire that Cyrus ruled.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-21747567.amp
Bekenstein Bound@20,
I suspect you’re right, but another possibility is that the previous year’s budget might just be “rolled over”; and there’s the complication that the Scottish Government’s revenue depends in large part on decisions made by the UK Government -- and the UK Parliament could change the rules under which the Scottish Government and Parliament run. It also seems possible -- since the Scottish Parliament and Government were only resurrected in 1997 -- that it’s never yet happened and what follows is not specified in the legislation which set them up! The SNP has run minority administrations before, and always managed to negotiate enough support from other parties to get a budget agreed, but this time, it’s not clear any other party has an incentive to come to their rescue, although four of them have enough MSPs to produce a majority along with the SNP. None of the three unionist parties (Labour, Conservative, Liberal Democrat) will want to be seen as propping up the SNP, and as I said, they’ve thoroughly alienated the Scottish Greens.