NYT: Trump's Electoral College Edge Could Grow in 2020, Rewarding Polarizing Campaign [View all]

[dalton99a]

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/upshot/trump-electoral-college-edge-.html

Trump's Electoral College Edge Could Grow in 2020, Rewarding Polarizing Campaign
Re-election looks plausible even with a bigger loss in the national popular vote.
By Nate Cohn
July 19, 2019

...

Many assume that the huge turnout expected in 2020 will benefit Democrats, but it’s not so straightforward. It could conceivably work to the advantage of either party, and either way, higher turnout could widen the gap between the Electoral College and the popular vote.

That’s because the major Democratic opportunity — to mobilize nonwhite and young voters on the periphery of politics — would disproportionately help Democrats in diverse, often noncompetitive states.

The major Republican opportunity — to mobilize less educated white voters, particularly those who voted in 2016 but sat out 2018 — would disproportionately help them in white, working-class areas overrepresented in the Northern battleground states.

If everyone who was eligible to vote turned up at the polls, the gap between the Sun Belt and Rust Belt would close. Texas, astonishingly, would emerge as the tipping-point state. Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, by contrast, would barely budge.

Of course, a full-turnout election is not going to happen. In recent months, analysts have speculated about a 70 percent turnout among eligible voters, up from 60 percent in 2016.

In this kind of high-turnout presidential election, by our estimates, the tipping-point state would drift to the right as people who voted in 2016 but not in 2018 return to the electorate and nudge states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin toward the president. At the same time, the Sun Belt would drift left. Arizona could overtake Wisconsin as the tipping-point state. But even in this hypothetical high-turnout election, the president’s approval rating in Arizona would be higher than it was in 2018 in Wisconsin. It becomes harder for the Democrats to win the presidency.

In such an election, the tipping-point state could have a net approval rating that is five points higher than the president’s national net approval rating, potentially allowing the president to win re-election while losing the popular vote by a wide margin.