In case either of my readers was wondering how I happened to know that Trump carried Iowa by more than he carried Texas, it's because I had just compiled the below table, which lists the states--strictly speaking, electoral vote possessing entities--in order of their Trump friendliness, as measured by the percentage of the popular vote margin in the 2016 election, from the state he won by the most (Wyoming) down to the District of Columbia, which he lost by almost as much as is arithmetically possible. I've also noted the electoral vote allotment of each state as well as a running total of the winner's tally, starting with the most lopsided result and accruing as the list converges from above and below on the narrowest outcomes. If you're interested in this kind of stuff, I think you'll enjoy scanning the table. I have a few comments below.
| State | Trump's % Margin | EV | Running Total EV |
| Wyoming | 46.3 | 3 | 3 |
| West Virginia | 41.7 | 5 | 8 |
| Oklahoma | 36.4 | 7 | 15 |
| North Dakota | 35.8 | 3 | 18 |
| Idaho | 31.7 | 4 | 22 |
| Kentucky | 29.8 | 8 | 30 |
| South Dakota | 29.8 | 3 | 33 |
| Alabama | 27.7 | 9 | 42 |
| Arkansas | 26.9 | 6 | 48 |
| Tennessee | 26.0 | 11 | 59 |
| Nebraska | 25.0 | 5 | 64 |
| Kansas | 20.5 | 6 | 70 |
| Montana | 20.2 | 3 | 73 |
| Louisiana | 19.7 | 8 | 81 |
| Indiana | 19.0 | 11 | 92 |
| Missouri | 18.5 | 10 | 102 |
| Utah | 17.9 | 6 | 108 |
| Mississippi | 17.8 | 6 | 114 |
| Alaska | 14.7 | 3 | 117 |
| South Carolina | 14.2 | 9 | 126 |
| Maine 2nd cong. dist. | 10.0 | 1 | 127 |
| Iowa | 9.4 | 6 | 133 |
| Texas | 9.0 | 38 | 171 |
| Ohio | 8.1 | 18 | 189 |
| Georgia | 5.1 | 16 | 205 |
| North Carolina | 3.6 | 15 | 220 |
| Arizona | 3.5 | 11 | 231 |
| Florida | 1.2 | 29 | 260 |
| Wisconsin | 0.8 | 10 | 270 |
| Pennsylvania | 0.7 | 20 | 290 |
| Michigan | 0.3 | 16 | 306 |
| New Hampshire | -0.3 | 4 | 232 |
| Minnesota | -1.5 | 10 | 228 |
| Nevada | -2.4 | 6 | 218 |
| Maine | -2.7 | 3 | 212 |
| Colorado | -4.9 | 9 | 209 |
| Virginia | -5.4 | 13 | 200 |
| New Mexico | -8.3 | 5 | 187 |
| Oregon | -11.0 | 7 | 182 |
| Delaware | -11.3 | 3 | 175 |
| Connecticut | -13.7 | 7 | 172 |
| New Jersey | -14.0 | 14 | 165 |
| Rhode Island | -15.5 | 4 | 151 |
| Washington | -15.7 | 12 | 147 |
| Illinois | -16.8 | 20 | 135 |
| New York | -22.5 | 29 | 115 |
| Vermont | -26.4 | 3 | 86 |
| Maryland | -26.4 | 10 | 83 |
| Massachusetts | -27.2 | 11 | 73 |
| California | -30.0 | 55 | 62 |
| Hawaii | -32.2 | 4 | 7 |
| District of Columbia | -88.7 | 3 | 3 |
I highlighted the Wisconsin row because it's where Trump reached 270 electoral votes, the number needed to win in the electoral college. One way of measuring the bias of the electoral college is to compare the result in the "tipping point state"--Wisconsin, in 2016--to the national result. Trump lost the national popular vote by 2.1% (45.9 to 48.0). He won the tipping point state by 0.8%. Trump therefore would have prevailed in the electoral college, and been elected president, even if there had been a uniform 0.75% shift toward his Democratic opponent. The electoral college, then, favored Trump by
2.1 + 0.75 = 2.85%
in the 2016 election.
The preponderance of one-sided results is striking. Although the national vote was close, in 33 of the 50 states the winner prevailed by a double-digit margin. In 6 of the other 17, the margin was greater than 5%. Since the whole game is to get to 270, the electoral college makes 40 or more states irrelevant. Trump won 6 states by 3.6% or less, and those 6 states have 101 electoral votes. If you live in one of them, you're going to know in the fall of 2020 that there's an election campaign going on! If you live in one of the other 44, your vote, if you vote, will have little or no effect on the result.
In the table, our country's rural-urban political divide is evident in the escalating manner in which Trump's electoral vote tally mounts. He won 30 states, 20 of them by a double-digit margin, and a total of 306 electoral votes. But he netted only 127 electoral votes from those 20 double-digit victories. Well over half of his electoral votes came from his 10 single-digit wins. States with large areas and small populations are overwhelmingly Republican. If I had to gauge from a single yes-no question whether someone voted for Trump or Clinton, I think I'd ask whether the population of the county they live in is more than 100,000. (Assuming I had to ask by, say, email, so that I had no idea of the respondent's race or gender, and assuming also that such questions as "Did you vote for Trump?" are out of bounds.) The map at the top of this post, depicting the result of the election by congressional district, is a similarly dramatic illustration of the divide. Since the districts all have about the same population, the rural ones are large in area, and the urban ones barely more than a dot. The map is perhaps 80% red by area, but, ballot-by-ballot, the result was more blue than red. Look at Minnesota, for instance. Clinton won the state.
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