Sept. 12, 2024, 2:07 p.m.
Former President Trump defeated Hillary Clinton eight years ago, despite receiving nearly 3 million fewer votes nationwide.
President Biden beat Trump by nearly 7 million total votes in 2020, yet the former president came within 65,009 votes across four states of winning the magic number of 270 Electoral College votes he needed for reelection.
As Trump prepares for his third consecutive presidential election as the Republican nominee, pollsters believe that he can once again take the White House without winning the popular vote.
The question for Vice President Kamala Harris, then, becomes the extent to which she needs to defeat Trump in the popular vote to succeed in the Electoral College. Biden won the popular vote by 4.5 points on his way to White House, while Hillary Clinton finished 2 points up.
“Harris has an average of a 2-4-point lead in the popular vote right now, and that still could, in theory, not be enough,” Democratic pollster Carly Cooperman told National Journal.
Republicans have lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections, yet they have managed to win the Electoral College three times in that span.
The 2022 midterms suggested that this pattern could be turning, as the GOP ran up the score in Florida, which had the second-most voters in 2020, and narrowed the results in deep-blue New York, which had the fourth-most, hinting that the popular vote could be tighter this year.
A National Journal analysis found that if this year’s presidential results match the 2022 Senate elections in Florida and New York, Republicans will improve by 1.4 points nationwide—without affecting the split of Electoral College votes.
University of Virginia Center for Politics Director Larry Sabato told National Journal that the problem with this change for Democrats is that there are 48 other states in this election, plus Washington D.C., which could shift in the other direction without changing the ultimate victor.
“You have 51 moving parts. Actually, you have tens of thousands of moving parts … all of them operating on their own system to generate turnout, their own level of competition,” Sabato said, referring to how votes shift in different ways at a hyper-local level.
Polling is also limited in these non-swing states, Sabato noted, so identifying the shifts outside the main battlegrounds is difficult. A quartet of Emerson College polls released last week found the results in California, Florida, Ohio, and Texas roughly matching the overall vote shares from 2020.
“I don’t think it’s going to happen,” Sabato said of Trump winning the popular vote, “because California will inevitably produce millions of excess votes for Democrats.”
Sabato said that nothing is guaranteed, but the “odds are pretty darn good” for Harris if she wins the popular vote by 3 points. Cooperman isn’t so sure.
“If you said 3 points, I would not say I was not confident. I would say, complete nail-biter in terms of how it plays out,” the Democratic pollster said. “I still feel like it has to be more than 4 points.”
What is likewise worrying for Democrats is how past polls have repeatedly underestimated Trump’s vote share. Sabato cited a Washington Post-ABC News poll from October 2020 that showed Biden with a 17-point lead in Wisconsin as an example of how some handicappers create unscrupulous surveys—the Democratic incumbent eked out victory in the Badger State by less than a point.
“You can’t be that far off and have put any time and effort and thought into that poll,” said Sabato. “There’s no way you can be 17 points off at the end.”
Cooperman said she doesn’t think that handicappers have fully corrected their methods and believes that Democrats will once again be overrepresented in national polls this year, even though some midterm surveys accurately predicted the results.
“We do so many different things to try to make sure we’re getting an accurate demographic representation of the right people, but it’s just not perfect,” Cooperman said.
Harris currently has a 58 percent chance of winning the popular vote, but only a 38 percent chance of winning the Electoral College, per handicapper Nate Silver’s model. If Democrats are overrepresented in national polls, as Cooperman said, this spells big trouble for Harris.
With voting set to begin imminently—Alabama became the first state to start sending its mail-in ballots to voters—the vice president’s strong performance at Tuesday’s debate couldn’t have come at a better time. Succeeding where Biden failed, Harris repeatedly lured Trump into the traps, making him appear angry as he repeated conspiracy theories and argued about the size of his crowds. To cap off the night, pop superstar Taylor Swift endorsed her, inspiring over 300,000 voters to visit a voter-registration site within 24 hours.
Whether the debate swayed swing voters is another matter.
“Debates tend to enhance a base’s support, so they’re catering a lot to people who are already set on voting for one candidate or another,” Tristan Hightower, a politics professor at Bryant University, told National Journal. “We don’t see a large switching from one party to another, one candidate to another, because of a debate performance.”
The debate had a huge nationwide audience, likely the largest that either candidate will attain this cycle, so there is potential, at least, for national polls to change. The only thing that matters to GOP pollster Frank Luntz, though, is what happens in swing states.
“I don’t even read the national polling numbers or the popular vote,” Luntz said in a statement. “It simply doesn't matter. At all. Zero.”
