Slight popular vote win for Harris could equal Electoral College victory

A winning margin of just a couple percentage points in the popular vote could translate into an Electoral College victory for Vice President Harris, a significant shift from the last two cycles where Democrats faced a significant disadvantage in the count.

The reason is shifts in the electorate that may allow Republicans to gain on Democrats when it comes to the popular vote, but that might not translate into more electoral votes for former President Trump and the GOP.

“Because of Republican gains in states like California, New York, Florida, it helps with the popular vote, and it even helps in the House, but it’s not efficient from an Electoral College standpoint,” said Zachary Donnini, a data scientist for Decision Desk HQ (DDHQ).

“You can win some states that you win by a big margin, and they don't help you anymore,” said Jason Roberts, a professor of political science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “Winning a state 80 to 20 doesn't help any more than winning at 55 to 45.”

Democrats have mostly been the victim of this effect. Since 2000, Democrats have won the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections. But they've won the Electoral College in just three of those cycles.

In 2016, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes but fell short of victory. She ran up the score on Trump when it came to the popular vote in states such as California and New York, but that was little solace when she won just 232 electoral votes.

To win the Electoral College, a candidate must secure at least 270 electoral votes.

Sixteen years earlier, Vice President Al Gore lost the Electoral College to Republican George W. Bush, even though Gore won the popular vote.

In 2020, President Biden won both, but his advantage in the popular vote and Electoral College obscured how close the election was. Biden won the popular vote by 7 million and earned 306 electoral votes, but he only won in the key states that put him over the top by a few tens of thousands of votes at most.

Donnini said circumstances of the 2020 race allowed Trump to still have a chance in the electoral vote even if he lost the popular vote by as much as 3.5 points. Biden won the popular vote by about 4.5 points.

This election cycle looks a little different.

If Harris wins the popular vote by 3.5 points, she would have an 80 percent chance or higher of winning the presidency, Donnini said. This is because polls show her performing better in the “blue wall” states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin relative to nationally.

As a result, Harris’s margin in the popular vote likely won’t have to be as large as past Democratic candidates’ margins.

“There's a lot of random variation here based on this, but our DDHQ’s modeling, in our forecast right now, pegs that number in between 1.5 and 2.5 percent compared to the 3.7 percent it was in 2020,” Donnini said. “So we think it's going to narrow, but we can't be completely sure.”

Polls suggesting demographic shifts in each candidate’s support could explain some of the shift.

Chris Jackson, the senior vice president of public affairs for Ipsos, said Harris has not performed as well as Biden with minority voters but has seemed to improve somewhat with white voters.

This could mean she loses some ground in Democratic strongholds like California and New York, while still comfortably winning them, but gains ground in the key states needed for her to reach 270 electoral votes.

“Given the swing states, particularly the Midwestern swing states, are much whiter than the country as a whole, that stronger performance in white voters means that she's got a little bit more space in those states to offset any potential losses with minority voters,” Jackson said.

He said Clinton was just a “coin flip” away from winning the Electoral College in 2016, only losing by a fraction of a percentage point in the key states. A 2-point Harris win in the popular vote, the same as Clinton, could deliver her the White House this year.

But just a 1-point win could fall short.

“I think anything less than 2 points, that’s a real, real troubling warning sign,” Jackson said.

And the possibility remains, although unlikely, that the opposite effect could happen with Trump winning the popular vote and losing the Electoral College.

John Cluverius, the assistant director of the Center for Public Opinion at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, said he could see either scenario occurring, with Trump barely winning the popular vote and Harris barely winning the electoral vote if the former president can cut into the traditional Democratic lead in California and New York enough.

Another possibly viable path could be Trump “runs up the score” among Latinos in states like Texas and Florida. Polls and recent elections have shown Republicans making gains with Latinos, though a majority of the group still favored Democrats.

Cluverius said a “traditional” situation of Harris winning the popular vote but not the electoral vote seems more likely, but some may underestimate how much certain key districts in blue states are talking about issues like immigration, which voters widely favor Republicans on.

“I think people going in with a lot of assumptions about the electorate that are based on that historical data,” he said. “Now that's not a bad thing, but it also means that people are going to assume that what’s going to happen is traditional Democratic strength in the popular vote and traditional Republican strength in the electoral vote.”

Cluverius added that the amount of split-ticket voting could be critical in determining the margins. Polling has regularly shown Democratic Senate candidates performing relatively strong compared to the top of the ticket, though in recent history split-ticket voting has not occurred in significant numbers.

“Because there is so much uncertainty in the race, because the race is so close, we have to have a broad mindset in terms of what could possibly happen,” he said.

Jackson noted that more people ultimately support Harris and Trump than will vote for them in the election, meaning the side better able to mobilize their supporters may be the victor. He said polling can sometimes struggle to adequately measure this, as it can measure how likely someone is to vote but not guarantee their behavior.

“We should all be prepared for a very close race to something that seems more of a blowout, which in a survey context, is still only a few percentage points,” he said.

Caroline Vakil contributed.