Earliest election where Republicans can win the popular vote?

[Ferguson97]

?

[MATTROSE94]

Ron DeSantis could win the popular vote against Kamala Harris in 2024 narrowly. Otherwise probably 2028 or 2032.

[dw93]

2028. Worst case for the Democrats in 2024 in the PV is Gore 2000 size margin.

[Kahane's Grave Is A Gender-Neutral Bathroom]

If we nominate Trump in 2024? Never. The window is closing where we can disassociate from him and still win votes before more people like me (fiscal conservatives who vote for a large amount of Democrats at this point because we hate the f**king culture wars) start to vote.

[Skill and Chance]

2028 if Biden seeks reelection, otherwise 2024 against Harris

[Non Swing Voter]

They can't.  It literally took incumbency + 9/11 for GWB to do it and even then it wasn't that great a popular vote victory, more than half of which came from his home state of Texas.

Earliest election - probably in the 2030's when they are forced to reinvent their party platform from scratch.

[TodayJunior]

Only when the democrats are disunited and that is unlikely to happen until 2040 or so thanks to trump. For every 1 vote they can gain in places like RGV in Texas, they lose 1.5 in metro Dallas, Atlanta, etc. they are hemorrhaging suburban voters faster than they are gaining in rural parts of the country. I don’t see what the catalyst is to stop it. They’re just screwed.

We know it. They know it. They know we know it. They’re in denial about it.

[Tartarus Sauce]

Whenever they, as a party, determine that democratic majoritarianism is an ideal to aspire towards again instead of something to fight upstream against through baked in structural powers. They're not interested in appealing to the sensibilities of the majority of Americans because their current modus operandi revolves around narratives as the beleaguered, heroic minority of a fading "authentic" Americanism.

[Shaula🏳️‍⚧️]

2024.
Democrats have had the advantage in the electoral college as recently as 2012.

[indietraveler]

Outside of some major external event like covid it could be quite a while. I was thinking about this recently - by 2024 we're getting into the portion of gen z that is of voting age AND has not been alive for a popular vote win for the republican party.

[DCUS]

Ron DeSantis could win the popular vote against Kamala Harris in 2024 narrowly. Otherwise probably 2028 or 2032.

I agree. Harris retains the Democratic NPV advantage, even if the GOP has an Electoral College advantage both relatively (as in more than its NPV disadvantage) and absolutely (as in more likely to win). But I do not know if Harris will learn from the mistakes of her 2020 primary campaign, including focusing too much on identity politics and not providing serious answers to serious questions (like the constitutionality of her gun control proposal and her past as a prosecutor). It is entirely possible for her to blow her NPV advantage.

[DS0816]

?

The “earliest election [in which] Republicans can win the [U.S. Popular Vote]” is with the next United States presidential election in which the White House switches from the Democratic to the Republican column.

[Mister Mets]

Obviously, the next election is the earliest they can win.

There are other ways to phrase it, like earliest election where Republicans have more than a 1 in 4 chance of winning the popular vote, although even in that case it's probably '24, as it seems likely Democrats will have either an 81 year old running for reelection or an open election with Kamala Harris.

[Crucial_Waukesha]

Republicans have only won the popular presidential vote once since the late 1980's, and even that was 50.7% with a popular incumbent, an overseas war, and in the wake of a traumatic terrorist attack. We're still very much in the age of the GOP getting plurality or minority wins via geographic/EC advantage.

Edit: as far as House GOP vote goes, they've won the popular vote 4 times since 1990: twice in anti-Dem president GOP waves, once in the wake of 9/11, and once with historically low turnout.

[Non Swing Voter]

Side note.  It's pretty insane that Democrats have won the popular vote (often by large margins) in 7 out of the last 8 elections.  Only a 9/11 event could deliver the popular vote to the GOP.  Yet, despite this the GOP has 6 of 9 SCOTUS justices and Democrats can't even get a bill passed to protect its voters right to vote (or at least get it back to where it was before the aforementioned justices gutted the voting rights act). 

And all the while, the GOP somehow complains about Democratic "activist" judges, as if the under qualified people they rammed through aren't activists.  The GOP is just a lot better at politics than Democrats.  If Democrats didn't have a natural 10 million plus constituency advantage they'd be screwed.

[Vosem]

Write-in: 2022.

(You obviously mean presidential election, but presidential nominees are almost always drawn from the pool of politicians that run for lower office. Republicans won the generic House ballot in 2010, 2014, and 2016, and only lost by 3 points in 2020 amidst a pretty bad environment. There's no reason a Generic R couldn't beat a Generic D in the popular vote in 2024.)