I usually love poring over election results, but this year it seems the outcome was too distressing for the pastime to be indulged. Avoidance has been my strategy. Yet a few morsels have leaked through my defenses, and this weekend, laid low by a GI bug, I've searched up enough of the details to make a report.
(1) The Republican advantage in the electoral college disappeared.
I think the way to measure this is just to observe that Harris lost the national vote by 1.5%, and, had she done 2% better everywhere, her electoral vote total would have come in at 270, the minimum needed to win. So a minimal popular vote victory (half of 1%) would have yielded a minimal electoral college victory (270-268). If you're interested in the details, her three narrowest losses were by less than 2%, in Pennsylvania (1.8%), Michigan (1.4%), and Wisconsin (0.9%). These three states have 44 electoral votes, which, added to the 226 that she won, make 270.
Four years earlier, the same kind of analysis yielded quite a different result. Biden won the national popular vote by 4.5%, yet Trump, by doing just 1% better everywhere—losing by 3.5% instead of by 4.5%—would have flipped the result in Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin. The electoral votes of these states would have lifted him into a 269-269 electoral college tie and, eventually, the White House after the provisions of the 12th Amendment provided a final boost.
So the Republican "tilt" to the electoral college went from 3.5% in 2020 to essentially zero in 2024. This tends to support my view that our system for electing the president requires us to insert the actual election result into one end of a rickety, 18th-century machine, turn a wobbly crank connected to its side with duct tape, then wait for something different and unpredictable to be ejected from the other end.
(2) There were four states—Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Nevada—carried by Trump that nevertheless elected a Democrat to the US Senate. No Republican won a Senate race in a state Harris won, but 4 "split decisions" is still, by recent standards, a lot. In 2020, there had been only one such state, Maine, where Republican Susan Collins was reelected to the Senate even though Biden prevailed in the presidential contest. Two years later, only Wisconsin elected a senator (Republican Ron Johnson) from a party that had lost the statewide presidential race two years earlier. And then, this year, 4.
Maybe this is just happenstance, the random results of a random walk through electoral history. But suppose you deeply resent Biden's inner circle of advisors indulging his wish to seek reelection and hiding, kind of, his cognitive decline from the public. The high number of split decisions—all in the same direction, R for President, D for Senate— suggests to me that an open Democratic primary might have spared the country four more years of Trump. The Biden Administration was unpopular. Democrats in general did okay.
You do have to wonder about, for example, the Arizonans who voted for both Trump and Kari Lake's Democratic opponent. Are they just randomly filling in ovals?
(3) Of Minnesota's 87 counties, Harris carried just 9--the three in the Arrowhead above Lake Superior, the county where Moorhead is, the county where Rochester is, and then four counties in the Twin Cities metro, including the Goliaths of Hennepin and Ramsey by more than 2-to-1 margins. She won the state by fewer than 140,000 votes but Hennepin County alone by more than 300,000 votes. Her statewide margin was roughly half way between Clinton's narrow one in 2016 and Biden's relatively easy win in 2020.
In our Senate race, Amy Klobuchar got 56% of the vote, down from 60% in her last race, and 64% in the one before that. Does the quality of the Republican opponent account for the slide? Uh-uh. Unless, for a Republican, the more outlandish, the better. I don't know what's going on.
I had guessed, based on the volume of TV advertising, that the race in the 2nd congressional district, between incumbent Democrat Angie Craig and Republican Joe Teirab, might be close. It wasn't: Craig won by 17 points. But that was the closest of the eight congressional races. Though the state as a whole leans Dem, it appears unlikely that our 4-4 delegation to the House of Representatives is going to change anytime soon. James Carville once said that, politically, Pennsylvania is three states named "Philadelphia," "Pittsburgh," and "Alabama." Since Minneapolis and St. Paul are so close together, we really only have "the Twin Cities" and "Alabama." Apologies to a few college towns.