Fully Myelinated

How much will the electoral college matter in 2008? Josh Patashnik has a great article in The New Republic discussing how all of the media focus on the electoral college lately is way overblown-- surely in large part due to the trauma of 2000. What I especially love about this article is that he uses all sorts of actual Political Science research to make his case. Basically, the electoral college almost never matters unless the popular vote is extraordinarily close, and there's no reason to expect that to be the case this year:

It's highly unlikely Obama will win the popular vote while losing the electoral college--in fact, it's all but impossible unless the popular vote is exceptionally close, as it was in 2000. But, on the off-chance Obama's trouble in those states does end up looming large, history gives little reason to believe that putting Rendell or Strickland on the ticket would do much to help.

At the moment, Electoral College obsession is once again overtaking the punditocracy, so please forgive me if I'm pointing out the obvious: The Electoral College very rarely matters, and our current fixation on it is mostly a product of memories from the Bush-Gore race. Before that year, only once in American history--1888--had a candidate won a popular-vote plurality while legitimately losing the presidency in the Electoral College. (The election of 1876 doesn't count, and in 1824 the vote went to the House of Representatives.) In both 1888 and 2000, moreover, the national popular vote was extremely close--a margin of 0.8 percent and 0.5 percent, respectively.

Once the national popular-vote margin gets much greater than that, it quickly becomes prohibitively difficult for a losing candidate to prevail in the Electoral College.

What I most appreciated about the article was the argument that we cannot say things like "if only 60,000 votes in Ohio had changed" in a vacuum. To wit:

More importantly, though, votes don't just spontaneously shift in one key state. A major insight from the 2004 campaign, on the part of strategists like Bush's Matthew Dowd, is that votes are determined less by one's physical location than by factors like demography and lifestyle choices: A Bush voter in Ohio looks like a Bush voter in California. As Bill Bishop argues in his recent book, The Big Sort , as Republicans and Democrats diverge from each other in their living patterns, they increasingly resemble their partisan compatriots across state borders.As a result, any event or trend capable of producing a swing of 60,000 votes in Ohio from Bush to Kerry would almost surely have had some effect outside of Ohio. If the effect had been distributed proportionally throughout the country, a swing of 60,000 votes in Ohio would correspond to a swing of around 1.5 million votes nationally--enough to erase Bush's 3-million-vote lead in the popular vote. Or, in 2000, suppose Al Gore's margin of victory in the national popular vote had been 1.5 percent, rather than 0.5. That amounts to a net gain for Gore of more than 1 million votes, and about 60,000 in Florida, if distributed equally throughout the country. Just a fraction of that figure would have given him the presidency, recount or no recount.

He concludes with a nice summary of some political science that I think puts things in proper perspective:

These questions are part of a larger debate in political science: Can the outcomes of presidential campaigns shift significantly as a result of campaign quirks, or are they determined largely by underlying economic and political fundamentals? For the most part, the latter view has won out--and it suggests that the Democratic nominee is headed for a relatively comfortable win. Of course, the candidacy of Barack Obama (or Hillary Clinton, for that matter) makes 2008 the first election that won't have two white male candidates, and therefore something of a historical anomaly. The race could end up being a 2000-style nail-biter--and, in that case, there's a small possibility that electoral math and running mates will make a difference. But if things do play out as they have for decades, a lot of hyperventilating pundits will have egg on their faces.

So...1) If Obama (or McCain) end us with a good lead in the polls in early November, forget about all the electoral college fuss. 2) Political Science research quite strongly suggests that this is a Democratic year, regardless of what Obama and McCain actually do in the campaign.

Posted by shgreene ( May 29 2008, 09:01:38 PM EDT ) Permalink