In Focus: US Election 2016
| Date | 01 April 2017 |
| Published date | 01 April 2017 |
| DOI | 10.1177/2041905817702733 |
| Author | Benjamin D. Hennig |
20 POLITICAL INSIGHT • APRIL 2017
In Focus
US Election 2016
The 2016 Presidential election was
not the first US election in which
the winning candidate lost the
popular vote. In US history this has
happened four times, two of which were in
the 19th century (and excluding the 1824
election where no candidate won a majority
of the electoral votes). Of the two other
elections, 2000 and 2016, the recent one has
a significantly larger gap between the two
contesters. Hillary Clinton won the popular
vote with a margin of 2.1 per cent over the
new president Donald Trump.
The comparison of the electoral outcome
in a normal map and an equal-population
projection shows how Clinton’s vote
dominates the spatial distribution of the
votes in the most densely populated areas
that stand out in the cartogram. Almost all
large urban centres, including quite a few
in the Midwest, show a majority of votes
for Clinton, while her vote share is in many
places lower (50-70 per cent) than Trump’s
support in his respective strongholds.
Trump’s vote share was highest in the rural
areas and suburban belts around the cities
where he could often secure 70 per cent and
above of the popular vote. In addition, the
geographical patterns of those who voted
for neither of the two candidates were more
distinct in many of the areas where Clinton
received the most votes. The polarisation of
the vote therefore contributed significantly
to the outcome of the election, helping the
republican candidate to secure a winning
majority in the Electoral College.
The reason for these imbalances lie in
the US voting system, which has found
its way into the US constitution as a
medieval relict from 11th century Europe.
The Electoral College was implemented in
the constitution in 1789 and has not been
revised since 1804. As an indirect election
of the president, voters cast their ballot
for an elector who is then voting for the
president in the Electoral College. While it is
not required by the constitution, usually all
electors from a state (apart from Maine and
Nebraska) give their votes to the winning
candidate with the most votes in that state.
In the 2016 election, seven electors chose to
defect from that tradition and became what
is referred to as faithless electors, including
two who did not give Trump their support.
The number of electors in the Electoral
College are determined by each state’s
representation in Congress, so that the
combined number of senators and
representatives constitutes the college.
During the campaigns, these metrics often
determine significantly where candidates
focus their attention, as mostly those states
with an even division of voters along the
political lines will eventually decide the
outcome of the election.
The decisive swing states dictate the
agenda of the campaigns and might leave
other voters feeling disenfranchised. In the
2016 election, this may have contributed
to significantly lower support for the
Democrats, which needed to balance an
aggressive rhetoric targeted at the more
rural and deindustrialised parts of the
country with their traditional strong support
in the urban centres.
This dilemma can, at times, lead to the
outcome that the 2016 election produced.
Trump won by narrow margins in a number
of large and crucial mid-western states, so
that losing the popular vote did not matter.
What George W Bush did similarly (yet with
a smaller margin) in 2000 could have almost
also happened to John Kerry four years later,
where Kerry was close to securing the vote
in some of the key swing states despite
losing the popular vote by a clear margin.
The structural problem of the Electoral
College system is deeply embedded in US
politics. It seems in urgent need of reform
towards a more democratic representation
of the individual states. The ratio of electors
compared to the overall population shows
that there is a strong imbalance of the
influence of each state on the election
outcome. Wyoming needs only about a
quarter of the votes to affect one electoral
vote compared to Texas, so that in turn
the influence of some states is much
higher than those of others. The bar chart
highlights these differences by setting
Wyoming as the benchmark (100 per cent)
and comparing the other states accordingly
to the overall influence of their electors in
the Electoral College. The accompanying
cartogram, which shows the states sized
according to their electoral votes, is shaded
by the ratio of population per electoral vote.
This data shows that the imbalances are
not a direct factor in the election outcome,
but that they contain more fundamental
structural flaws. While the current system
does not necessarily favour one of the two
main political parties, it favours some of the
smallest states. More importantly, it drives
and distorts the agenda of the campaigns
which are targeting the decisive (and
mostly larger) states. The discrepancy of
representation of popular votes between
states and the whole country remains
a crucial problem of the US electoral
system that – as the 2016 election has
controversially demonstrated yet again –
even with a merely (almost) binary choice
for the voter remains too unfit for purpose of
a modern democracy.
Benjamin D. Hennig is an associate
professor at the University of Iceland.
Benjamin D. Hennig maps how Donald Trump won
the White House despite losing the popular vote.
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