This situation is not new. The 2016 and 2020 elections were just as close, and earlier, in 2000 and 2004, the candidates were less than 2.5 percentage points apart in the votes cast.
However, even the popular vote does not matter at the national scale. The US presidential election is not decided by who polls more votes across the country, but through an Electoral College with 538 members (making 270 the winning number).
All states have electors in this college; the number of electors in each state is roughly in proportion to the state population (but biased in favour of small states). All the electors of each state (except Nebraska) must vote for the candidate who wins the state’s popular vote.
In this system, winning a state by millions of votes or a single vote comes to the same thing. That candidate wins all the state electors. So strange is this system that in 2000 and 2016, the candidates who became president (George W. Bush and Donald Trump respectively) were elected with fewer votes overall than their opponents.
This complicates the central point of this column. With the exception of Barack Obama’s two victories in 2008 and 2012, the US has become a 50-50 nation in the 21st century. There are only two real political parties and therefore just two political blocks.
Currently, 43 of the 50 states that make up the Union are clearly in one block or the other. But when we add those 43 states together, the Democratic and Republican blocks are equal in size. They cancel each other out.
The remaining seven states (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin) are 50-50 states themselves. They are called ‘swing,’ ‘battleground’ or ‘toss-up’ states, as they could lean a little one way or another from one election to the next. As a result, when all 50 states are added, we end up where we started: a 50-50 nation.
So close are these elections that in 2016, just 77,000 votes altered in the right combination of states would have elected Hillary Clinton instead of Trump. The 2020 election was even closer. Changing only 42,000 votes in a particular set of states would have re-elected Trump over Joe Biden.
With over 155 million votes cast, that works out to 0.027%. Thus is decided the political fate of the most powerful country on earth, the global hegemon with an armed presence in all corners of the globe and 26% of the global economy.
Most of the 43 states that are either Democratic or Republican are firmly so. For example, big urban states like New York, California, Massachusetts and Maryland all voted more than 60% in favour of Biden.
On the other side, small rural states like Wyoming, Idaho, North and South Dakota and a big block of southern midsize states like Alabama, Arkansas, Tennessee, Oklahoma and Kentucky all voted more than 60% in favour of Trump.
These are not 50-50 states, but decidedly belong to one block. If we use 55% as the threshold (instead of 60%), almost all the remaining states fall into one block or the other.
What looks like an evenly split national electorate is in reality distinctly partisan at the level of states. Rural states are Republican, urban states are Democratic. States dominated by Caucasians are Republican, while diverse states with African-Americans and immigrants are Democratic.
Less educated and lower-income states are Republican, while more educated and higher-income states are Democratic. What are the odds that adding up these deep divisions produces parity?
It’s like a chessboard. Each square is black or white—or red or blue in the American colour scheme—but in total there exactly 32 squares of each colour.
What may be just as strange is the fact that this parity comes after the core identities of the two parties have been reversed. For long, the Republican party was favoured by African-Americans (because Abraham Lincoln, a Republican, “freed the slaves”), whereas the Democrats housed segregationists, especially in the south.
When the Democrats embraced civil rights in the 1960s, the Republicans embraced their infamous ‘southern strategy’ of racial polarization. From the 1870s through 1960, Alabama was a Democratic-voting state 22 times in a row; now it has voted Republican 11 straight times.
From the 1850s through the 1920s, Massachusetts voted 17 of 18 times for Republicans; for the last nine straight elections, it has voted for Democrats.
Not only has party orientation in the US flipped along geographical and racial lines, there is increasing evidence that class identities are flipping too.
The core Democratic voter till the 1980s used to be blue-collar, less educated and of lower income. Over recent years, the core Democratic voter is more educated and affluent, whereas the typical Republican voter is blue-collar, less educated and of lower income.
This national parity despite state-level partisanship and churn of party-identity is a puzzle worthy of examination. But there appear to be no good explanations.
Relentless polling may have something to do with it by nudging non-partisan voters in a direction that maintains balance. One wonders what the outcome would be if polling were banned and people could vote without knowing how others were voting.
Amid this churn, the Indian-American vote—a little less than 1% of the total—has largely been inconsequential. Indian Americans vote heavily in favour of the Democratic Party, 80% or more in recent elections.
But because these votes are concentrated in decidedly Democratic states like California, New York, New Jersey and Illinois, they have had little impact on the Electoral College or national outcome.
However, as Indian Americans are now settling in battleground states like Georgia and North Carolina, they may begin to tip the scale. We will know in a few days.