Would A Reformed Electoral College Have Changed The 2020 Election?

With less than two weeks to go until the 2024 presidential election, we decided to estimate how a reformed Electoral College (proportional distribution vs. winner-take-all) might have affected the outcome of the 2020 election. While we didn’t do an exhaustive analysis of all 435 congressional districts (something for a later doctoral dissertation), we focused on the 13 key battleground states of that election. Chances are that the trends we’d see in these battlegrounds would not be significantly different for the entire nation.

As you may recall, Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump with 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232 (270 are needed to win). Also, Biden won the popular vote—garnering about 7 million more votes (81.2M) than Trump (74.2M). 

We tallied up all of the congressional district wins that each candidate banked in those battleground states that they lost, and then re-allocated those votes using the proportional method. Basically, this gives the losing candidate in each state some Electoral College credit for winning part of that state.

Interestingly, the re-allocation did very little to change the outcome. Again, we’re only doing this for these 13 battlegrounds, but we found that Trump had a net gain of 5 electoral votes (237 up from 232) and Biden saw a net loss of 5 votes (301 down from 306). While there are scattered other significant congressional district wins for Trump in states he lost (e.g., 9 districts in California, 7 in New York), they likely aren’t enough to erase the 64 vote lead enjoyed by Biden. Plus, Biden had other congressional district wins in states that Trump won.

The bottom line is that this Electoral College reform is a somewhat better match of the popular vote result, without significantly altering the outcome. More importantly, it re-enfranchises millions of voters who might otherwise “waste” their vote on a “losing” candidate in the winner-take-all format.