2020 is the 2nd closest election in modern history

[ElectionsGuy]

Biden won by 7 million+ votes.

Not close.

Abolish the Electoral College.

https://twitter.com/LarrySabato/status/1325465642754068480?s=20

https://twitter.com/brianklaas/status/1334138925795975169?s=20

https://twitter.com/JoshuaADouglas/status/1335218799931494401?s=20

https://twitter.com/jdsoup/status/1333503514492989447?s=20

I'm curious Gass. Do you think that the 2016 election was close? 78K votes between 3 states in 2016 is larger than 45K votes between 3 states in 2020. You quoting Dem pundits to prop up a braggadocious talking point doesn't change that, and the popular vote doesn't decide the election. We can argue it should, but that's an alternative thread.

[Gass3268]

Biden won by 7 million+ votes.

Not close.

Abolish the Electoral College.

snip

I'm curious Gass. Do you think that the 2016 election was close? 78K votes between 3 states in 2016 is larger than 45K votes between 3 states in 2020. You quoting Dem pundits to prop up a braggadocious talking point doesn't change that, and the popular vote doesn't decide the election. We can argue it should, but that's an alternative thread.

I quoted three Political Science/Law professors (you know the people with doctorates/law degrees who get paid to teach how elections work) and a CNN anchor. Didn't know those count as Dem pundits. Anytime the popular vote and electoral college vote splits it is a close election. That didn't happen this time.

[ElectionsGuy]

Biden won by 7 million+ votes.

Not close.

Abolish the Electoral College.

snip

I'm curious Gass. Do you think that the 2016 election was close? 78K votes between 3 states in 2016 is larger than 45K votes between 3 states in 2020. You quoting Dem pundits to prop up a braggadocious talking point doesn't change that, and the popular vote doesn't decide the election. We can argue it should, but that's an alternative thread.

I quoted three Political Science professors (you know the people with doctorates/law degrees who get paid to teach how elections work) and a CNN anchor. Didn't know those count as Dem pundits.

Yeah, and those people obviously favor Democrats based on all the stuff they post on Twitter. The reason I made this thread was to distinguish the decisiveness of the electoral college win from the raw number of EC votes and popular votes, which those smart people with degrees (which automatically means they're objective and neutral?) want to point to because it favors their political narrative.

[morgankingsley]

Biden won by 7 million+ votes.

Not close.

Abolish the Electoral College.

Well 7 million with 159 million votes is a lot closer than 5.5 million with 104 million votes. Its all relative to percentage.

[RussFeingoldWasRobbed]

And it wouldn't have if it hadn't been for the anarchist rioters and their defund the police crud. Thanks a lot! Now we are screwed downballot for a decade!

[Gustaf]

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.

I mean, I know the idea.

I think what bothers me a bit is that it rests on assumptions of uniform swing. Imagine a candidate won every state by a narrow margin. You could say the loser was close because if they had shifted the margin simultaneously a little bit in half of those they would have won. But overall, that could still be a lot of voters when aggregated.

[Motorcity]

This was not supposed to be a close election. We ran a very weak ticket in Biden/Harris.

Really?

Because the consensus here and in the media is that any other Democrat would have lost.

Biden won because of suburban college educated women disgusted by Trump. Those who voted Democrat for the first time in 2018. This surge more than made up for the swing in minorites towards Trump.

They wouldn't vote for any Democrat they would raise their taxes. Period. So that takes out Warren and Sanders. Every other Democrat is either unappealing or has their own issues (Bloomberg).

[An American Tail: Fubart Goes West]

Biden won by 7 million+ votes.

Not close.

Abolish the Electoral College.

snip

I'm curious Gass. Do you think that the 2016 election was close? 78K votes between 3 states in 2016 is larger than 45K votes between 3 states in 2020. You quoting Dem pundits to prop up a braggadocious talking point doesn't change that, and the popular vote doesn't decide the election. We can argue it should, but that's an alternative thread.

I quoted three Political Science professors (you know the people with doctorates/law degrees who get paid to teach how elections work) and a CNN anchor. Didn't know those count as Dem pundits.

Yeah, and those people obviously favor Democrats based on all the stuff they post on Twitter. The reason I made this thread was to distinguish the decisiveness of the electoral college win from the raw number of EC votes and popular votes, which those smart people with degrees (which automatically means they're objective and neutral?) want to point to because it favors their political narrative.

Gotta agree with you on this. 45,000 votes is closer than the 78,000 votes that separated us from a Clinton victory in 2016. Obviously not as close as 2000 with its 537 vote margin (coincidentally the same number of EVs cast since a DC elector didn’t vote), but if those 45,000 votes went the other way, we’d be looking at 4 more years of Trump. 45,000 is minuscule compared to the 7,000,000 total popular vote margin.

Sure, the popular vote wasn’t super close, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a close election under the rules governing the election of the President of the United States. I wonder what the four folks quoted from Twitter would be saying if Biden won by 6,955,000 votes (give or take) while losing the election.

And I will say that it shouldn’t have been close given the job that Trump has done as well as the polls showing a roughly 8% lead for most of the time since like June.

[Skill and Chance]

Biden won by 7 million+ votes.

Not close.

Abolish the Electoral College.

snip

I'm curious Gass. Do you think that the 2016 election was close? 78K votes between 3 states in 2016 is larger than 45K votes between 3 states in 2020. You quoting Dem pundits to prop up a braggadocious talking point doesn't change that, and the popular vote doesn't decide the election. We can argue it should, but that's an alternative thread.

I quoted three Political Science professors (you know the people with doctorates/law degrees who get paid to teach how elections work) and a CNN anchor. Didn't know those count as Dem pundits.

Yeah, and those people obviously favor Democrats based on all the stuff they post on Twitter. The reason I made this thread was to distinguish the decisiveness of the electoral college win from the raw number of EC votes and popular votes, which those smart people with degrees (which automatically means they're objective and neutral?) want to point to because it favors their political narrative.

Gotta agree with you on this. 45,000 votes is closer than the 78,000 votes that separated us from a Clinton victory in 2016. Obviously not as close as 2000 with its 537 vote margin (coincidentally the same number of EVs cast since a DC elector didn’t vote), but if those 45,000 votes went the other way, we’d be looking at 4 more years of Trump. 45,000 is minuscule compared to the 7,000,000 total popular vote margin.

Sure, the popular vote wasn’t super close, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a close election under the rules governing the election of the President of the United States. I wonder what the four folks quoted from Twitter would be saying if Biden won by 6,955,000 votes (give or take) while losing the election.

And I will say that it shouldn’t have been close given the job that Trump has done as well as the polls showing a roughly 8% lead for most of the time since like June.

Hmmm... this is an interesting question, but keep in mind that Trump would be expected to improve in the rest of the country if he flipped those states.  So Biden would lead by more like 5.5M votes in that scenario.  In fact, given how little GA typically swings with the PV, it's not crazy to think AZ, WI, and maybe even PA could flip first.  It's quite possible Biden loses more than 0.6% nationwide and still wins with PA/MI/GA. 

[Mr. Smith]

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.

[Skill and Chance]

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.

Republicans had enough state delegations to reelect Bush in the House anyway.

[An American Tail: Fubart Goes West]

Biden won by 7 million+ votes.

Not close.

Abolish the Electoral College.

snip

I'm curious Gass. Do you think that the 2016 election was close? 78K votes between 3 states in 2016 is larger than 45K votes between 3 states in 2020. You quoting Dem pundits to prop up a braggadocious talking point doesn't change that, and the popular vote doesn't decide the election. We can argue it should, but that's an alternative thread.

I quoted three Political Science professors (you know the people with doctorates/law degrees who get paid to teach how elections work) and a CNN anchor. Didn't know those count as Dem pundits.

Yeah, and those people obviously favor Democrats based on all the stuff they post on Twitter. The reason I made this thread was to distinguish the decisiveness of the electoral college win from the raw number of EC votes and popular votes, which those smart people with degrees (which automatically means they're objective and neutral?) want to point to because it favors their political narrative.

Gotta agree with you on this. 45,000 votes is closer than the 78,000 votes that separated us from a Clinton victory in 2016. Obviously not as close as 2000 with its 537 vote margin (coincidentally the same number of EVs cast since a DC elector didn’t vote), but if those 45,000 votes went the other way, we’d be looking at 4 more years of Trump. 45,000 is minuscule compared to the 7,000,000 total popular vote margin.

Sure, the popular vote wasn’t super close, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a close election under the rules governing the election of the President of the United States. I wonder what the four folks quoted from Twitter would be saying if Biden won by 6,955,000 votes (give or take) while losing the election.

And I will say that it shouldn’t have been close given the job that Trump has done as well as the polls showing a roughly 8% lead for most of the time since like June.

Hmmm... this is an interesting question, but keep in mind that Trump would be expected to improve in the rest of the country if he flipped those states.  So Biden would lead by more like 5.5M votes in that scenario.  In fact, given how little GA typically swings with the PV, it's not crazy to think AZ, WI, and maybe even PA could flip first.  It's quite possible Biden loses more than 0.6% nationwide and still wins with PA/MI/GA. 

Totally fair point. It would still be crazy for Biden to lead by so much in the popular vote and still lose under such a scenario.

[Oswald Acted Alone, You Kook]

And the closest that wasn't stolen in some way.

[Mr. Morden]

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.