The first thing that pundits got from the recent election was how divided the country is. This time, the pundits were right. To put some quantification on this at the state level, I looked at some preliminary data from the election. This isn’t final, but the percentage data will shift less than the underlying actual numbers, and that was fairly-near done on Sunday when I gathered them.
The states (and DC) can be put into 5 blocks: Solid Democratic, those states (and DC) where Trump got less than 40% of the vote, Strong Democratic, where Biden got more than 50% of the vote, but weren’t solid D, Swing states, where neither candidate got 50% of the vote, Strong Republican, where Trump got more than 50% of the vote (but Biden got more than 40%) and Solid Republican, where Biden got less than 40% of the vote.
26% of the total votes came from Solid Democratic states, and they have 25% of the electoral votes. The corresponding statistics for other blocks are:
Strong Democratic: 20% popular ; 21% electoral
Swing: 13% popular ; 12% electoral
Strong Republican: 29% popular ; 28% electoral
Solid Republican: 12% popular : 15% electoral.
(Although I did not allocate the two electoral votes that stray from Maine and Nebraska, the rounding gives a total of 101% in the electoral votes.)
By this definition of “swing,” every swing state went for Biden, all but Nevada by less than 1%. Florida, Ohio, and Iowa, which could be considered swing states on their history, all gave Trump over 50%. So did North Carolina; I don’t know why it took so long to call.
Even on the state level, we are sorting ourselves out by party.
26% of the people (or of the votes, which is a good indicator of the people) live in solid Democratic states. That includes 32% of Democrats but only 19% of Republicans.
12% of the people live in solid Republican states. That includes 16% of Republicans but only 8% of Democrats. Three of the 14 states in this block gave less than 30% of their votes to Biden, although two of those have only a hair less.)
29% of the people live in states that are strong Republican, including 33% of Republicans and 26% of Democrats. That means that states with significant Republican majorities have 41% of the population and 43% of the electoral vote. They hold 49% of Republicans and 34% of Democrats.
20% of the people live in states that are strong Democratic, including 22% of Democrats and 19% of Republicans. That means that states with significant Democratic majorities have 46% of the population (and 46% of the electoral votes). They hold 54% of the Democrats and 38% of the Republicans.
Comparing those four blocks, then, the Democrats have a small but significant lead in the total population in states that favor them. The more obvious difference is within the major divisions. The solid Democratic states outnumber the strong democratic states by 30% in population. The strong Republican states outnumber the solid Republican states by about 150%.
Democrats complain that they must carry more than 50% of the popular vote to reach 50% of the electoral vote. Many blame that on the many small (in population) states which are solid Republican. That’s one cause, and you can see it in the list where the solid Republican states have 15% of the electoral vote but only 12% of popular vote. Probably more influential, though, is the huge share of the Democratic vote that is cast in the solid-Democratic states. The excess of the Democratic vote in these states over the Republican vote was 167% of the excess in the nation as a whole.
The last block consists of the swing states. This has 12.7% of the population and 11.9% of the electoral votes. Yet, in one sense, this is the block that matters. These states went for Biden, by (in every case but one) less than 1%. Some of the same states went for Trump in 2016 by less than 1%. That was the winning margin each year. This block holds 12.3% of Democrats and 13.3% of Republicans. Because there were more Biden voters than Trump voters, the higher percentage of Trump voters represented fewer votes in the case of each state. (I’ve been using percentages without decimals because the figures I start with are not final. I put in one decimal place for this block because everything is so close.)
The problems for the nation are that the decision is made so closely and that the country is so direly divided, otherwise.
The problems for the Democrats are that they got a huge popular-vote majority but a very slender electoral-vote majority; their plurality in the swing states was just 1.3% of their plurality in the nation. Then, too, how often can they have an opponent as bad as Trump? The Democrats have been telling themselves for years that the people who don’t vote would be theirs if they did; they voted, and almost evenly.
The problems for the Republicans are even more serious and more numerous. In the past 30 elections precisely 2 have ended a party’s control of the presidency after only 1 term, 1980 and 2020. Of the last 7 elections, the Republican presidential candidate has won the popular vote only once. While the close states have gone nearly all the same way in the past 2 elections, an even split would favor the Democrats; states with a Democratic majority have 232 EV, while states with a Republican majority have 221 EV. Solid Democratic states have twice the population of solid Republican states, and 167% of the electoral votes.
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My previous version of this had errors and omissions.
I hope that this version is correct.
Solid Democratic:
HW
WA
OR
CA
CT
DE
MD
VT
DC
MA
RI
VA
Strong Democratic:
CO
NM
MN
MI
IL
NY
ME
NJ
NH
Swing:
NV
AZ
WI
PA
GA
Strong Republican:
AK
MT
TX
IA
MO
MS
NC
SC
FL
IN
OH
Solid Republican:
UT
ID
WY
OK
KS
NE
SD
ND
AR
LA
AL
TN
KY
WV
.