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How 2020 will be different from 2016
Could Trump lose the popular vote by 5 million ballots in 2020 and still win re-election?
If you’re like me, you spent the weekend depressed after reading Nate Cohn’s column in The New York Times or David Wasserman’s post on the NBC website.
In each, the two data science-focused reporters looked at the Presidential election polling. Rather than simply looking at the national results, they considered the state by state results and analyzed what these results mean for the election.
The results of their analysis was shocking. While Trump’s negative ratings on a national level seem to make his re-election unlikely, their state-by-state analysis indicated that there was a path for Trump to repeat his narrow electoral college win of 2016, this time while losing the popular vote by as many as five million ballots.
The reason a state-by-state analysis is valuable is because we elect our Presidents on a state-by-state basis.
As a result, if the Democrat wins California by 1 vote or 3 million, he or she still gets all 55 electoral votes. Similarly, if Trump wins Texas by 1.5 million votes or by 1 vote, he gets all 38 electoral votes.
