Friday, August 18, 2017

What is the minimum % of the popular vote needed to win the electoral college?

I have tried to answer the question of what the min. % of the popular vote is needed to win the electoral college. CGP Grey tried to answer it in his YouTube video "The Trouble with the Electoral College", and he concluded that it was 22%. But that video was made 6 years ago, and I think it used the entire population of the state instead of the voting-eligible population. So I tried to answer the same question using more up to date data and the voting-eligible population of each state. The answer appears to be higher than CGP Grey's number: specifically, it appears that you need at least about 24.1% of the popular vote to win a bare majority (in this case, about 52%) of the votes in the electoral college. The way to do this is to win the 40 least populous states and the District of Columbia, while losing all 10 of the other states. You also have to get just 50% + 1 of the popular vote in each state, and there have to be no third-party candidates to make winning any of these states easier/harder for you. The data from my Excel spreadsheet is here in case you want to fact-check me on this.