While I get it and I've used this myself, this also feels like a strange metric to me in a way. The tipping point state only matters because of the electoral college, so why not just look at the electoral college directly?
This metric gets at the question of how close an election was to going the other way, in the sense that a minor change in circumstances might have swung things towards the losing candidate. In both 2016 and 2020, for example, if just 1% of the winning candidate's voters had voted for the losing candidate, then we'd have a different candidate winning.
But that's not true in the case of 2004, for example, even though the electoral college tally was closer. That's because in that case, Kerry would have needed Ohio (or some other state that voted more Republican than Ohio) to flip to him in order to win, and the margin in Ohio was more than 2%. So we weren't really all that close to seeing a Kerry victory.
Nevada, Iowa, and New Mexico put it to a tie...and Colorado had fewer votes to flip despite the higher percentage.
Pretty sure the numbers combined amount to only slightly more than OH.
That’s right, but unlike others in this thread, I don’t think “the combined number of votes needed to swing the election” is a very sensible metric. I think the metric used by ElectionsGuy is a much better way to look at things.
Others objected that it assumes a “uniform swing”. I agree that that makes it imperfect, but the alternatives are worse.
I mean, imagine an extreme scenario: Let’s suppose that the losing candidate is at 266 electoral votes, so could have won with just 4 more electoral votes. And let’s say that they lost Pennsylvania by 2 points and New Hampsire by 17 points. This year, there were ~800,000 voters in NH and ~7 million in PA. So assuming something similar in this hypothetical a 17 point deficit in NH might actually represent fewer voters than a 2 point deficit in PA. But if we’re meant to be thinking about how close the election was in the sense of whether minor differences in circumstances leading up to election day might have changed things, then I think it’s ridiculous to say that because NH has a small population, that it “almost” went the other way. Pretty much anything that would have moved NH by 17 percentage points would have moved PA by more than 2 percentage points.
In general, I’d think that assuming that all the states moving by a similar percentage of the vote is more realistic than assuming that things could have changed by whatever the necessary margin is in these specific states, with absolutely no movement anywhere else, especially if the states in question are small population states that would have needed big percentage swings.
