![]() I’m a bit surprised that this is so difficult, I’m sure I’ve seen charts with overlapping bars. ![]() Neither Excel nor Numbers would let me specify negative distances between the bars to make them slide behind each other. Putting pairs of bars next to each other was entirely ineffective, there was way too much noise, even with ample spacing between the pairs (which also created a huge chart). What surprised me was how hard it was to produce a good chart for what I considered a simple dataset and question. I will work on such a comparison for a future posting. But since I was mostly interested in popular vs. What is missing here is data about sitting presidents who did not get re-elected. I have no explanation how this was possible, especially in Wilson’s case. There are two notable exceptions, Andrew Jackson and Woodrow Wilson: in these two cases, a gain in one actually translated into a loss in the other. Would a sitting president tend to gain or lose points? And what is the effect of the electoral college here? The following chart shows this data for presidents who got re-elected.Īt first glance, it appears that most re-elected presidents did gain votes, and most of these gains were amplified by the electoral college (the losses, too). Since I already had the data (which I scraped from Wikipedia), I got interested in looking at the second terms of presidents (or, in the case of FDR, in second, third, and fourth terms). For another data-centric discussion of how less than 1% change in popular vote could have changed the outcome of many of the past elections, see Mike Sheppard’s How close were Presidential Elections? Second Terms ![]() But I think this chart illustrates quite nicely what effect the current system has. This is really only meant to provide a data point for the discussion of the merits of the electoral system – the issue is far too complex to be boiled down to a few numbers. Bush, but the list also includes Bill Clinton, Richard Nixon, and others. The shaded area marks the 50%, and you can see that there were quite a few presidents who where pushed across that mark by the electoral college system. The other thing the chart shows is where a candidate was elected with less than 50% of the popular vote. The boost from the electoral system is quite astounding in many cases, easily adding 30 points and more to the popular vote. The idea was that the instances with electoral < popular would stand out.Īs you can see, there were only three instances where the electoral percentage was lower than the popular one. So I ended up with a kind of stacking where the longer bar would be “behind” the shorter one. Since I wanted to compare, I tried out a number of different configurations, but none made it easy to see the instances where the electoral vote would be smaller than the popular vote. The blue bars show the popular vote, the green ones electoral votes. So I came up with the following graphic to answer my question. In recent elections, with only two candidates from the two big parties, this has become almost synonymous with the previous question – any third-party candidate would only get a minuscule fraction of the popular vote and not a single electoral vote. The other aspect is whether the candidate who wins is the candidate the absolute majority of people (i.e., more than 50%) voted for. My hypothesis was that the percentage of electoral votes the winner got would always be higher than the popular vote. First, there is the relative majority: which candidate got the most votes? Splitting this up further, there is the popular vote (how many people voted for a particular candidate) and the electoral vote (how many electors voted for that candidate). There are a number of consequences of this that I don’t want to discuss in detail here, but what I was interested in was the boost this system gives to the strongest candidate. All but two states have a winner-takes-all system, with Maine and Nebraska using a slightly more differentiated way of splitting up its delegates between the candidates. I was interested this last effect, so I did a little analysis.Ī presidential election in the US is essentially 51 separate elections (50 states plus the District of Columbia). Its mechanics and distribution of electors are crucial for presidential campaigns and determine the so-called battleground states – and possibly also distort the will of the people. The Electoral College is a key aspect of the US presidential elections.
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