Republicans are expected to win 65 percent of close presidential races in which they lose the popular vote as a result of the Electoral College and the blue-state concentration of Democrats, according to a new working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research. Researchers from the University of Texas at Austin looked at the probability of “inversions” in presidential elections, where the popular-vote winner loses the electoral vote. These inversions happened in 2000 and 2016 and twice in the 1800s, meaning that the candidate with the most votes has lost 8 percent of the time in the last 200 years.
Using statistical models that predicted an inversion in the 2000 and 2016 races, the researchers found that the probability of the popular vote winner losing the electoral vote is about 40 percent in races decided by 1 percent (about 1.3 million votes) and roughly 30 percent in races decided by 2 percent (2.6 million votes) or less. But these probabilities are “not symmetric across political parties,” the researchers say. Over the past 30 to 60 years, this asymmetry has favored Republicans. The statistical models used in the research predict that in the event of an inversion, “the probability that it will be won by a Republican ranges from 69 percent to 93 percent.”
“But conditional on a narrow popular vote loss for Democrats, modern Democratic candidates have had about a 35% chance winning the Presidency via inversion,” the researchers wrote, meaning that Republicans have a 65 percent chance of winning all future narrowly decided elections. “If elections continue to remain close,” as they have in recent races, the researchers wrote, “inversions will occur with substantially higher frequency” than they have in the past.
Another researcher, Dean Spears, told the outlet that the paper shows that Trump’s 2016 win was not a fluke, and the chances of a repeat are only increasing.
“I think a lot of people think that there was something special or improbable about the 2016 election. That with the politics of these times, 2016 was somehow a fluke. One of the important things that we learned is that that’s not true,” he said. “Not because it was unlikely, it was an inversion because an inversion is likely in a close election.”
https://www.salon.com/2019/09/18/new-st ... pen-again/“The visible public problem right now with the electoral system is that the candidate who came in second gets the White House,” he said. “But the real problem is that very few states get the attention of the presidential campaigns.”
The Democrats strategy is to stress blue state issues like gun control and ignore red states.