How the US presidential election works and why I think Trump will win in 2024

I recently went to The Rest is Politics live show in Manchester, featuring the hosts of both the UK and US editions of the podcast. One thing that struck me was when Alastair asked ‘who do you think will win the US election?’ (and he explicitly said that he meant who do you think will win, not who do you want to win). About 90% of the audience put their hand up for Harris, and only a small number (including me) for Trump. This got me thinking about how the US presidential election works and what the routes are for either candidate to win.

First of all, the US presidential election is very different to how we pick a prime minister in the UK. The salient features are:

• Each state has a number of electoral college votes, roughly based on the state’s population.¹
• There are 538 electoral college votes available.
• With two exceptions, the candidate with the most votes in a state gets all of the electoral college votes from that state.²
• A candidate must get a majority of electoral college votes to be elected president, so the magic number is 270.
• The majority of states are safe Democrat or Republican, i.e. the same party always wins that state.
• The number of Senators and Representatives for either party are irrelevant for deciding who wins the Presidency – it’s possible for the President’s party to have control of the Senate, the House, both or neither (though this does have an impact on how easily they can deliver on their promises).

There are a few things that follow on from this:

• In most cases, there is no point in winning a state by more than 1 vote because this will not get you any closer to the presidency.
• It’s better to win lots of states by a small margin than a few states by a large margin.
• It’s possible for a candidate to get more votes overall (‘winning the popular vote’) and still not become president. This happened in 2016 (Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, Trump became president) and 2000 (Gore won the popular vote, Bush became president).
• Unless a candidate really screws up (e.g. Harris losing California), only a few swing states actually matter. Effectively, there are only a few routes to winning the presidency.
• If you can win a state with a high number of electoral college votes that normally votes for the other party, you stand a good chance of winning the presidency. Obama pulled this off in 2008 when he won Florida (27 electoral college votes at the time, now 30), which usually leans Republican (lots of rich white retired people live there).
• The most valuable swing states are those with the highest number of electoral college votes. Arguably, that makes Pennsylvania (19 electoral college votes) the most important state this time – whoever wins that will probably win the presidency.

In theory it’s possible for neither Trump nor Harris to win a majority, in two circumstances:

1. They both win 269 electoral college votes.³
2. Another candidate wins enough electoral college votes to deprive both Trump and Harris of a majority.

However the two party system is very strong in the US, unlike the UK where it is possible for a party to win a minority of seats in Parliament and still form a government. So it’s extremely likely that either Trump or Harris will get 270 or more electoral college votes, and therefore become president.⁴ The last time a third party candidate won electoral college votes from a state was in 1968.⁵

The reasons I think that Trump will win are:

• The electoral college system favours the Republicans, who have been able in the past to win the electoral college without winning the popular vote. Trump has already done this once.
• In 2016 all the aggregate polls were predicting a win for Hillary Clinton, yet Trump still went on to win. This time, the polls are much tighter.
• Trump has been president once, so it is easier for voters to think he can do the job, whereas they can dismiss Harris as not being ready (by which they probably mean because she’s a woman).
• Trump seems to be getting far more media attention. Some of this might be for negative reasons, but there’s an argument that there’s no such thing as bad publicity – he’s certainly shaken off stories that would have killed the campaign of other candidates.
• It feels a bit like Harris has the worst of both worlds – the downside of being an incumbent (and therefore blamed for situations such as the crisis in the Middle East) without getting the credit for Biden’s policies.

There are some positives for Harris – she’s generally running a more upbeat campaign, and has some endorsements that might swing some key constituencies (e.g. Taylor Swift with young women). However, I think she has a lot more to lose from any missteps – which will be blown out of proportion if she says or does anything ‘wrong’. Overall, based on past performance and the tightness of the polls, my money (if not my vote, were I to have one) is on Trump.

1. Technically it’s the number of senators, which is always 2, plus the number of Representatives, which is based on the population but always at least 1, so the minimum is 3. This favours smaller states to an extent.
2. Maine and Nebraska allow splitting of their electoral college votes, though this is rare. This splitting would probably only matter in an extremely tight election.
3. There are a few routes to 269 votes, though they are very unlikely compared with other possibilities.
4. There are procedures for electing a president in the event that no candidate gets 270 electoral college votes, but they have never been used in the 20th or 21st centuries.
5. Strictly speaking the Libertarian candidate received one electoral college vote in 1972, however this was due to an elector being faithless, i.e. voting for the candidate other the one who won their state. This has happened on several occasions, but never in numbers sufficient to change the result.