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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 September 2013
For at least two decades, it has been conventional wisdom among political guras that our system of choosing presidents through electoral votes, accumulated state by state, offers Republicans a substantial edge. Representative is a comment by a Democratic strategist to Newsweek (7/27) in the summer of 1992: “It's the same map we've had to deal with for years—and the results haven't been good. You need all the breaks with a map like that….”
The notion that Republicans have an “electoral lock” on the White House has been received wisdom among pundits ever since Horace Busby, a former aide to President Lyndon Johnson, coined the phrase. The idea is that even if Democrats fare well in the popular vote, the electoral map is skewed against them.
There is only one problem with the idea. The election numbers just don't support it.
It is obvious that, in presidential contests of the 1970s and 1980s, major regions went overwhelmingly Republican. From 1972 through 1988, the Democrats did not once carry a single state among the eight of the Mountain West. They did little better in the South: Jimmy Carter dominated the region in 1976, but Democrats carried a total of just one old Confederacy state in the other four elections. Clearly these have been regions of deep Democratic weakness at the presidential level.
1. All calculations here are based on the Presidential election numbers from America Votes.
2. He actually got only 111, as one West Virginia elector opted for Vice-Presidential candidate Lloyd Bentsen.
3. These numbers exclude, of course, the 6.6 percent of the popular vote won by John Anderson. But since Anderson finished no better than third in every state, he was not a serious competitor for electoral votes, though he seems to have tipped some states (like Massachusetts) into the Reagan column.
4. Of course, Ross Perot won 19 percent of the 1992 vote. But he was behind the two leaders in all of the states which affect this calculation: ie, those which Clinton won by narrow margins.
5. Running the same calculation without California, Clinton's minimum winning percentage drops to 50.25: ie, he needs that share of the popular vote in the other 49 states to win a majority (248–236) of their electoral votes.
