If only counting states swept by a single party since 2000, Democrats have a built-in 242-179 EC lead.
Maps like the one above have given some modest amount of comfort to Democrats whenever discussion of the 2016 presidential election comes around. It has long been an article of faith, particularly among those on the left, that Democrats have a built-in systemic edge in the Electoral College because of the winner-take-all format coupled with the tendency of larger, more urban states to lean Democratic.
The map generated above (and you can go generate your own, if you wish) helps to buttress that basic argument. If one looks at the past four presidential elections (2000-2012), with a perfect partisan split (two-and-two) of Electoral College majorities, Democrats have gone four-for-four in states totaling 242 electoral votes, just 28 shy of electoral victory. Republicans, meanwhile, have swept states that tally up to 179 electoral votes (actually 180, but the ability of Barack Obama to snare Nebraska's 2nd District in 2008 drops them by a single electoral vote).
Viewed through this lens, two things stand out. One: there aren't a hell of a lot of "swing states." Giving that extra Nebraska vote to the GOP, all that remains are 10 states, totaling 116 electoral votes, that have offered their electoral votes to both parties since 2000. Two: the Republicans have to win the outsized majority of those "swing" electoral votes to win the presidency. If the Democrats can hold onto just 24 percent of the electoral votes "in play," they win the White House.
There is only one problem: there are considerably better ways to analyze the "generic" lean of the Electoral College. And all of them, to varying degrees, paint a far more perilous picture for the Democrats. Follow me past the jump to explore those other scenarios.
While still a Democratic lead, this map looks a little less comfortable for the blue team. This is a map showing which party has had a larger
vote total over the last four presidential election cycles. One could make a compelling argument that this is a far more effective way of looking at presidential election performance, because four victories by 1 to 2 points are a lot different than four victories by 20-plus points. This also takes those "swing states" that have been carried by either party and puts them into one column or the other. As a result, this flips some of those "swing states" to the GOP, most notably Virginia and Florida. Others turn blue (Nevada and Colorado among them).
What makes this map even more perilous for the Democrats—two of the states they "carry" under this scenario have an average Democratic "lead" over the last four cycles of less than 1 percentage point: Ohio and Colorado. Flip those states to the GOP, and the Democratic Electoral College majority is gone.
(Of course, conversely, a similar tailwind in the Democratic direction would give them Florida.)
The overarching point of this map, and the data that lies beneath it, is that any inherent Democratic advantage in the Electoral College would need only a slight red-tinted headwind to be neutralized, or even reversed.
Part of the reason why is that there are far more light-blue states in the electoral college landscape than light-red ones. Consider, if you only include states that lean clearly to one party or another ("clearly," for my purposes, will be an average lead of 6-plus points), Democrats only have a secure hold on 207 electoral votes. The GOP has a secure hold on 196 electoral votes. That's due to the fact that only three states (Florida, Virginia, and ... oddly enough ... Missouri) have seen an average Republican edge of less than 6 points. Meanwhile, Democrats have eight states in that "under-6" category, including two of their bigger gets (Ohio and Pennsylvania).
However, even this form of Electoral College analysis is biased, albeit somewhat modestly, toward the Democrats. After all, though the two parties have split the last four presidential elections, the margins of victory have been quite different. Barack Obama's two winning margins (7.26 percent and 3.86 percent) were considerably better than the 2004 margin of victory for President George W. Bush (2.46 percent). And, of course, George W. Bush's inaugural victory in the Electoral College came while losing the national popular vote by roughly one-half of a percentage point.
Therefore, perhaps the best way to look at the states, all things being equal, is to analyze where they stand when the national margin for each election is held constant (at zero, since we cannot make a solid guess this far in advance where the national mood will be in 2016). The news for Democrats is, as we've seen above, a little bit positive and a little bit cautionary.
First, the good news for Democratic supporters, and one that supports the "generic Electoral College lead" argument: if you retrofit the 2012 presidential election results by taking away Obama's final national popular vote lead of 3.86 percent, the Democrats would still win the Electoral College, all things being equal. More good news: even if Democrats lost the state where they had the narrowest edge (Virginia, where Obama did ... ahem ... 0.01 percent better than his national margin of victory), the Democrats would still claim the White House.
Alas, there is bad news, and it is bad news that echoes an argument above: the Democrats have a shit-ton of states in which they barely hold an edge. Indeed, there were five states (with over 50 electoral votes) where Obama ran 2 points or less ahead of his national numbers: Iowa, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Colorado, and Virginia. For the GOP, there was only one state where Mitt Romney came within 2 percent of the national average or less: Ohio.
Indeed, if you push the margins out further—to a double-digit edge in either direction from that national average—the Democrats actually trail the GOP in electoral votes (191 to 179). So, while Democrats had to feel quite good about their two substantial Electoral College wins in 2008 and 2012, it is important to note that it seems highly unlikely that any of the Romney 2012 coalition is immediately in play. In fact, only one state would seem to fit that bill—North Carolina, which not only was one of the closest states in the union in 2012, but is a state where the Democrats have been pulling closer to the GOP (vis-a-vis the national average) in every single election cycle since 2000.
On the other hand, there are a number of Obama 2012 states that seem far more imperiled. Democrats have not beat the national average in Florida in any of the past four presidential elections, and they've only done so in Ohio once. Therefore, as odd as it might seem for two states carried by Obama on both occasions, the numbers seem to hint that the Democratic nominee might need at least a slight national tailwind to carry those two large and pivotal states.
However, one potentially important caveat that could benefit the Democrats is that there are a pair of larger states that are considered swing-y have been clearly moving in their direction. The aforementioned North Carolina is one of them. While Democrats carried the state in 2008 and lost in 2012, it is worth noting that, relative to the national average, it still moved fractionally in the direction of the Democrats. Whereas Republicans enjoyed a 13-point edge over Democrats (with respect to the national average) in 2000, that margin had been winnowed down to under 6 points in 2012. The other state is Virginia. In 2000 and 2004, Virginia wasn't a high priority for either party, and the GOP took it both times with margins of over 8 percentage points. Over the last two cycles, however, it has shifted notably, running closer to the national average than any other state in the union. In that time, it has shifted more than 8 percentage points in the Democrats' favor.
If those two states continue to trend to the Democrats, as they've done through the past four elections at the presidential level, that could make a huge difference, when one considers that this presidential election looks likely to be won at the margins, barring a national surge for either party.
What seems clear, based on the data, is that Democrats might have the slightest of generic edges (all things being equal), but the narrowness of that advantage cannot be emphasized enough. The appearance of a large built-in blue firewall in presidential elections is largely a facade, and Democrats would do themselves immeasurable harm in assuming that it has the kind of breadth and strength to be of much use to them come November 2016.