A newbie's guide to the 🇺🇸 Presidential Elections

As the heat rises over the 2024 US Presidential Elections, you'll see a lot of interesting terms being thrown around in the media coverage. Let's take a look at what the Presidential Elections are and some interesting quirks with the process!

We'll make use of data from Donald Trump's winning 2016 bid to understand the different aspects of this process. Scroll away!

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The elections for the President of the United States take place every four years, with the registered voters in each state and D.C. casting their ballots on Election Day.
But the election is a lot more complex than this. Let's see why!

The Popular Vote

On the left, we can see how people in each state voted in the 2016 Presidential Election. Hover over the states to see more information. The bar at the top shows the popular vote distribution between the two big candidates from the Democratic Party (blue) and the Republican Party (red).

We see that Democrats swept the popular vote with a 48% share, with Republicans falling short at 46%.

But
Donald Trump, the Republican candidate became the President in 2016. How so?

The Electoral College

Behind that magic is the concept of the Electoral College. Simply relying on popular vote would mean that big cities and populous states would have an outsized impact on the Presidential election, with the smaller states' voice possibly getting sidelined. To avoid this, the Founding Fathers decided to make the Presidential election as an indirect election.

When voters vote on Election Day, they are voting to elect the Electoral College, not the President and the Vice-President directly. Every state gets a certain number of electors - one for each congressional district - with small states getting at least 3 electors, giving a total of 538 votes. These electors then meet to elect the President and Vice President in December. Therefore, to win, the candidate needs to win a simple majority, i.e. cross the 270 barrier.

Fun Fact - Except Nebraska and Maine, all states require a 'winner-takes-all' voting, wherein all the electors in a state are required to vote for the candidate that won the popular vote. Though it can be said that this is similar to simply using the popular vote, it has the effect of giving smaller states a larger say in the Presidential vote and dampening down the impact of popular vote from large cities.

The chart on the left shows the electoral votes that each state had for the 2016 election. We can see that the Republicans were able to successfully win many states , and though Democrats won big states, they were unable to amass enough electoral votes to win the election.

Red, Blue and Purple States

While the electoral college ultimately decides the outcome of the presidential elections, popular vote is important for a host of different reasons. The most important reason being that it reflects the opinion of the voters, and is important not just morally, but also for deciding the political strategy in upcoming elections.

The chart on the left shows how each state and D.C. has voted in the past 12 presidential elections. Ideally, there would be no clear pattern when it comes to elections, since popular priorities and election promises will change every 4 years, and so will the issues and campaign focus. Hover over your state to see how they voted in any given year.

But, in reality, that is not true. There have been certain states which have consistently stayed loyal to one party over the course of over 48 years! Nine of the 50 states have voted for the Republican candidate in each election (by popular vote) since 1976, while only one state and D.C. have voted for Democrats every year since 1976.

Fun Fact - Even in his landslide 1984 victory, the Republican candidate, President Ronald Reagan failed to win from Minnesota and D.C., which led to these two being the only Democrat-voting states in this list. Coincidentally, Minnesota was the home state for the democratic candidate Walter Mondale!

If we zoom in further, we see that this partisan stability has expanded to a lot more states in recent years. In the past 20 years, only 15 states swung, i.e., flipped their winning candidates at least once, while 35 states and D.C. remained loyal to a single party. This led to the terms 'red state' and 'blue state' being popularized, denoting party allegiances. This number was even smaller between the 2016 and the 2020 elections, with only 5 states changing "color".
Although all states contain considerable numbers of both liberal and conservative voters, the 'winner-takes-all' methodology used by most states lead to this categorization. Similarly, even though the state might seem to be politically inclined to one party, it is more complicated locally, with the urban-rural divide associated with the largest differences.

With most states opting for the 'winner-takes-all' strategy, winning the popular vote becomes important, especially in states that have a large electoral college. And with certain states historically voting for the same party, it might be counter-intuitive to expect that to change without an objective reason. These two factors combined have led to candidates focusing their time and resources campaigning only in certain states. These key states are called as 'battleground', 'purple' or 'swing' states.

Now, not every state with a large electoral college is a swing state. That distinction is reserved only for the states where the fight is predicted to be close and could go either way. These states are decided in the run up to the campaign by analyzing opinion polls, political trends, recent voting patterns and candidate-specific factors too. Therefore, the swing state map changes every election.

Swing states are less impactful in landslide elections, and having a narrow margin does not necessarily indicate a swing state - it is also about how close the race at the top is, which decides whether the electoral college of a certain state will be impactful as a swing state. This shows the complicated relationship between the popular vote and the electoral college.

The chart on the left shows the popular vote in the 2016 presidential elections, with states with a small winning margin being shown in a fainter color. This election was noteworthy because it featured one of the largest disparities between the popular vote and the electoral college.

When discussing red and blue states, we mentioned that there are local disparities within a state, especially between urban and rural counties. We dive deeper into this aspect now.
The chart on the top shows the winning votes cast for the 2016 presidential election, in counties with total votes greater than 100k. The further away from the center, larger is the winning margin. The chart on the bottom shows the same but for counties with total votes less than 100k. Larger the circle, more are the total votes cast.

As we can see, Democrats command a victory in counties with large voting populations. Thus, winning a smaller number of large counties can give the Democrats a huge popular vote share. On the other hand, Republicans have a dominant position in a large number of small counties, with a heavy rightward skew in the lower chart.
Therefore, we see that the states in the midwest have traditionally been red states, while the mid-Atlantic states and the west coast have become democratic strongholds. Studying at a more granular level, we can see similar correlations within states as well - for example, Georgia frequently turns out to be a battleground state because though most counties in Georgia vote red, counties in urban areas in and around Atlanta are dominated by blue votes, leading to a toss-up.

Now that you know how the Presidential Elections work, what remains is to identify your issues, study the candidates well and most importantly, get out and vote!