A study examines how potential Electoral College bias may affect the 2020 US presidential election. As demonstrated in 2016, US presidential candidates who do not receive the popular vote may still garner enough electoral votes to win the presidency. However, whether the Electoral College demonstrates long-term partisan bias remains unclear. Robert Erikson and colleagues created a model to predict which candidate the electoral vote is likely to favor during the 2020 US presidential election. The authors examined electoral and popular votes from elections that took place between 1980 and 2016 and compared them with model-predicted electoral votes. The Electoral College did not exhibit long-term bias against the popular vote or favor a single party. Electoral vote simulations for 2020 using popular vote results from 2016 suggest that the inflection point between a Biden or Trump Electoral College victory is at Biden winning the popular vote 51% to 49%, rather than a 50-50 split. However, the simulations also suggest that a degree of uncertainty remains about the Electoral College outcome within the range between a popular vote tie at 50-50 and Biden winning the popular vote by around 52% to 48%. The findings suggests that the 2020 Electoral College bias is likely to tilt Republican, but to a lesser extent than it did in 2016, according to the authors.
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Article #20-13581: "Electoral College bias and the 2020 presidential election," by Robert S. Erikson, Karl Sigman, and Linan Yao.
MEDIA CONTACT: Robert Erikson, Columbia University, New York, NY; tel: 917-658-9516; e-mail: rse14@columbia.edu
Journal
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences