what is the minimum number of states that a candidate needs to win

Rakeda Leaks (right) and Candice Williams fill out Electoral College maps on ballot night 2008. Bloomberg via Getty Images hide caption

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Bloomberg via Getty Images

Rakeda Leaks (right) and Candice Williams fill out Balloter College maps on election night 2008.

Bloomberg via Getty Images

It's that time over again: time for Americans to figure out how, exactly, their presidential election works. "Balloter College" searches fasten every 4 years, but before Ballot Twenty-four hours, according to Google ... and the search volume is picking up right now.

Long story short: To win the presidency, yous don't accept to win the majority of the popular vote. You take to win the bulk of electoral votes — that is, 270 of them.* In well-nigh states, a candidate wins electoral votes past winning the most voters.

So. Win a land by just one vote, and you lot win all of its electoral votes (unless you alive in Nebraska or Maine, which divvy up their votes a trivial differently).

This can lead to off-kilter ballot results — in 2000, for example, Democrat Al Gore won the popular vote by a few hundred thousand votes, but lost the presidency by five electoral votes. So we wondered: Just how few votes would a candidate need to win 270 electoral votes?

We decided to notice out. A candidate only needs to win the xi states with the most electoral votes to hitting 270. Assuming only two candidates (a large assumption; run across beneath) and that ane candidate won all of those states by just one vote, and so didn't win a single vote in any of the other states (or D.C.), how many votes would that candidate have to win? It depends on how you lot do the math. Either mode, it's far less than half.

Initially when we did this story, we found that if y'all start with the biggest-balloter-vote states, the answer is 27 percent. However, we have an update: every bit Andrej Schoeke very nicely pointed out to u.s.a. on Twitter, there'due south another mode to exercise it (via CGP Grey) that requires fifty-fifty less of the popular vote: kickoff with the smallest-electoral-vote states. Our math went through a few iterations on this but by our final math, in 2012 that could take meant winning the presidency with only around 23 percent of the popular vote.

The thought here is that a voter in a low-population country like Wyoming counts for a larger share of electoral votes than pop votes.

And if one were to beginning with the largest states, it would exist 27 percent. Hither'south a await at that math:

We're making a lot of assumptions here — we're using vote totals from 2012, for 1 matter. Moreover, nosotros're assuming there are merely two candidates in the race.

And permit's be articulate about the obvious hither: This kind of an farthermost election isn't going to happen. And if information technology did — if there were somehow a bunch of ane- or 2-vote wins, you can bet the recounts would stretch into 2017.

And nosotros're likewise sure that with whatever number of tweaks to the math (like plugging in a third or fourth candidate), you could come up with results that are slightly-to-moderately dissimilar. Simply that's non really the point here. The signal is that the Electoral College can skew election results to a fantastic degree.

How a 7-point win becomes a "landslide"

This kind of pop-electoral vote discrepancy is why some articles about the 2008 election had to be conscientious to telephone call Obama'southward win an electoral landslide — he won 68 percentage of the electoral vote but only about 53 percent of the popular vote.

Skewed wins similar this happen regularly in U.S. elections — a pocket-size pop vote margin can yield a ridiculously large Balloter College margin. For instance, in 1984, Ronald Reagan beat Walter Mondale in the popular vote past eighteen points — a sizable gap, but nothing similar the Electoral Higher walloping: Reagan won 525 balloter votes, chirapsia Mondale past 95 pct points.

Here's what those gaps look similar in every election going back to 1960's race, in which John F. Kennedy merely squeaked past Richard Nixon in the pop vote by around 100,000 votes:

Ironically, the 2000 ballot — whose event struck many people as unfair because Gore won the pop vote simply non the electoral vote — likewise has the electoral-vote margin that almost closely reflects the popular-vote margin. In that sense, i could phone call it one of the "fairest" elections in modern politics.

Well, maybe. But so, come November. 9, at that place will be no deviation for the losing candidate between getting 250 electoral votes or 150 — a loss is a loss.

The difference an Electoral College makes

The Balloter College and current demographics mean that both parties often take particular electoral votes for granted: Democrats regularly win California and New York, while Republicans win Texas and Georgia (however, things take been closer than usual in those states this year).

(As well, there are enough of easy wins for each party at the low end of the spectrum. Wyoming is regularly Republican. Hawaii regularly votes Democratic.)

And that means that candidates regularly spend a disproportionate corporeality of time in loftier-electoral-vote battlefield states like Florida and Ohio as they plot their "paths to 270." This ways voters in Los Angeles or San Antonio (or Cheyenne or Honolulu) don't get that much attention.

If the Electoral College disappeared tomorrow, entrada strategy would probably shift dramatically; Democrats might campaign more than in Austin, Texas. Republicans might do more than outreach in conservative parts of California. Either mode, the people of Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania might get some respite from the onslaught of rallies and ads every four years, as candidates try harder to win bigger parts of the country.

*Before you fire off an email, yeah, nosotros know: You can still win the presidency without winning 270 balloter votes. If no candidate hits 270, then the House votes. But nosotros're talking outright on election night.

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Source: https://www.npr.org/2016/11/02/500112248/how-to-win-the-presidency-with-27-percent-of-the-popular-vote

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