From: ncovey@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu (neil covey)
Newsgroups: talk.politics.misc
Subject: Re: Polls: are Americans fickle?
Date: 26 Aug 92 20:54:34 GMT
Organization: Indiana University

In <1992Aug26.151428.13783@Princeton.EDU> pswanson@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Paul Swanson) writes:

>In article <adams.714753937@spssig> adams@spss.com (Steve Adams) writes:
>>
>>Not to mention that national popular vote polls tell nothing about how the
>>electoral college will turn out.  Individual polls in each state need to be
>>conducted, and electoral projections made.  Why?  Because it's likely Bush
>>could get slaughtered popularly, but still scrape by and win electorally...
>>
>There simply is no precedent for someone loosing big in the popular vote
>and winning in the electoral college.  All this talk about the electoral
>college lock for the Republicans is garbage.  The fact that there are
>states which are sure to go for Bush implies rather the opposite of what
>most people seem to think.  Namely Clinton can win with a minority of
>the popular vote but Bush cannot.  Why?  Lets examine the situation.

>A state that is firmly pro-Bush implies that Bush will win there by
>quite a majority, say 10% at worst.  Now, supposedly the Democrats don't
>have a lock on any state, which means that most states that they win
>will be by a much smaller margin that the states where Bush has a lock.
>I'll leave the math as an exercise to the reader but it should be fairly
>clear that for Clinton to get more total votes that Bush he will have to
>carry far more states than Bush which, in turn, implies that Clinton
>will win the electoral college if he wins the popular vote.

>Basically it boils down to this; the election is won by the person who
>wins the popular vote.  The rest is fodder for newspaper columnists.

Paul's logic is faulty in numerous places.  There have been (or, at
least, has been) [an] election(s) in which the loser has had a greater popular
vote, and there have been races in which the popular vote would only
have had to switch by a few thousand in a couple of states to throw the
election to someone who had far fewer popular votes--all of which is to
say that it is more than possible for either Clinton or Bush to win the
popular vote and lose the election.  I'm not so sure about Paul's
statement that there are no states firmly in the Clinton camp.  I see
Arkansas, DC, and Hawaii, and probably Minnesota as locks.  I see Utah
and South Carolina as locks for Bush (though in some polls Bush trailed
in SC before the convention and only led Clinton by 7-8% in Utah; it
would be interesting to see how Bush stands in those two states).

The one thing working against electoral/popular vote opposition is that
by and large there is an increasing amount of homogenization in
America--at least in terms of political attitudes.  There may be an
increasing amount of racial diversity as blacks, hispanics, and asians
increase their numbers while those of northern European origin 
dwindle or stabilize in number, but there is a lot less divergence in
attitude about basic issues as far as geography and rural vs. urban vs.
suburban attitudes are concerned.  This homogenization means, I think,
that most states vote alike.  So in this, Paul is right, a victory for a
popular vote loser is less likely.  But, in a close election, as this
one might still be, someone can target monies and resources and win
10-15 states by small margins, lose fairly substantially in raw votes,
just because the small margins he lost by in the other 35-40 states
added up, and still win the electoral vote.  Indeed, in the primary
parallel to this scenario, this is why Brown or Tsongas could win a
primary and still end up with fewer delegates for a state because
Clinton would have targeted key precincts.
Newsgroups: talk.politics.misc