A Glimpse Into The US Electoral College And Possible Presidential Outcomes
By: Madhur Dixit
Tags: Democrats, Presidential Campaign, Election 2020, Republicans, Politics

The ongoing US elections has seen a record high turnout with at least 159.8 million votes projected as of Wednesday 9am ET. This is said to be the highest number of ballots cast in a presidential election among all eligible citizens since 1900.

With early voting and mail in ballot voting, Democrats held a significant advantage in early voting due to their embrace of mail balloting, which republicans and Mr. Donald Trump have repeatedly opposed, claiming that the system is prone to widespread fraud.

Before I dive into the impact of the ongoing elections and vote count, I would like to give a brief on what exactly the electoral college is and how the presidential winner is decided based on the electoral college. When all eligible voters cast their ballots for the US President, they actually vote for the elector. An elector is a representative of the running candidate’s party. In total, there are 538 electors who then vote for the president on behalf of the people of their respective states.

Each state has a certain number of electoral votes assigned based on the number of congressional districts, plus two additional votes that would represent the states senate seats.

A break down of state wise electoral votes can be found below:

The info graphs shown above are updated as of 11:15 pm GMT, with Michigan and Wisconsin called for Joe Biden in the race for the presidential elections.

In order to come out as a winner, a majority of 270 votes is needed to win the presidency. As of 11:15 GMT, the presidency is in favour of Joe Biden with him standing at 264 votes in his bank with Michigan being the latest state that was called in his favour. This will surely give Mr. Donald Trump some sleepless nights in the coming days until results from other battlegrounds are announced. Mr. Trump now stands with 214 electoral college votes (With major swing states such as Florida, Ohio and Iowa called in favour of Mr. Trump).

Mr. Trump’s path to victory has considerably narrowed even with the three swing states or battlegrounds, namely Georgia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania still counting and leaning towards him at the moment. The important point to note here is that Mr. Trump had a higher percentage point (double figure %) lead in these swing states in the morning which has now reduced to 4.3% in Pennsylvania, 1.4% in North Carolina and 1.1% in Georgia. The electoral college operates with a winner takes all system in which the candidate with the highest number of votes in a state claim all the electoral votes. So any early conclusions made by experts yesterday in favour of Mr. Trump stand in a jeopardy because as of now even if Trump, hypothetically, secures a victory in these three swing states, that would still take his total electoral vote count to 268.With Mr. Biden leading in Nevada write as I write this, a victory in Nevada would take Mr. Biden to the magic number of 270 which is required to win the presidency. In order for Mr. Trump to win in this election, he must sweep the four remaining battleground states.

Conversely, we can’t say yet that Mr. Biden is a clear winner just yet although the chances of that happening are very high. For example, in 2016 Hilary Clinton won by significant margin in California and New York but failed to earn enough electoral votes in the battleground states such as Pennsylvania and Michigan which was a turning point in that election making Mr. Trump as a winner. Trump won 6 battleground states in 2016 adding 99 electoral votes to his total. The swing states therefore are very important in determining who would take over the White House. If we look at the election outcomes from 2016, it could still be possible that Mr.Trump is able to sweep the remaining four battlegrounds. Even if it is by 0.1% in each remaining battleground, Mr Trump would take all electoral votes (a total of 60 electoral votes) based on the winner takes all system on which the Electoral college operates.

To conclude, I would like to say that it is still too early to call out who the winner is and that the right prediction could be made once the results from Georgia and Nevada are out on Thursday by noon Eastern Time. On Thursday if it turns out that Nevada and Georgia are called for Mr. Trump, it will be important to wait until November 6th, 12th, 18th and 23rd when the results from North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Alaska are expected to come out.

In my next article, I will be talking about how the ongoing US elections would impact the global financial markets. Stay tuned, as the next article will be coming up Friday evening by 10 pm BST.