Close State Outcomes in Presidential Elections

 In Defying the Odds, we talk about the social and economic divides that enabled Trump to enter the White House. In our next book (title TBA), we discuss how these divides played out in 2020.

 Drew DeSilver at Pew:

Joe Biden’s victory in the presidential election was sealed by a string of close wins in several key states. Biden won Pennsylvania by just 1.2 percentage points, Wisconsin by six-tenths of a percentage point, Arizona by about a third of a percentage point, and Georgia by a quarter of a percentage point. In those four states combined, Biden beat incumbent President Donald Trump by fewer than 125,000 votes out of 18.5 million total votes cast.

Close state races, it turns out, are nothing new in U.S. presidential elections. So while we wait for the remaining states to certify their results and the electors to formally pick Biden, here’s a look back at some of the closest races of elections past, and an assessment of just how common such races are.

Over the 50 presidential elections that have taken place since 1824, the first election for which statewide popular votes were both determinative and reasonably reliably reported, there have been 187 instances in which a state was decided by less than 2 percentage points (our definition of “close” for the purposes of this post). That’s an average of 3.74 states with close races per election.

This year, five states were “close” by our definition: In addition to the four mentioned above that Biden won, Trump carried North Carolina by 1.4 percentage points. In 2016, Trump won four of that year’s six close states.

The record high for close states in a presidential election was in 1976, when 11 states (with 156 electoral votes) were decided by less than 2 percentage points. That reflected the overall tight race between President Gerald Ford and Democratic challenger Jimmy Carter. Carter ended up beating Ford by 1.7 million popular votes out of 81.5 million cast, and by 297 electoral votes to 240.

Kasich the Politician

David Weigel writes at The Washington Post:

Donald Trump derides the “losers” who have captured America’s government. Onetime front-runner Jeb Bush attacks the reality show star as insufficiently conservative. Kasich is trying something else, telling voters that, yes, he’s a politician and a good one. Four years in the Ohio Senate, 18 years in Congress, five years as governor, most of them good.

Maybe this approach will work for Kasich. But he should choose his words carefully, heeding a lesson from forty years ago.

In 1976, Senator Birch Bayh (D-IN) ran for president by openly proclaiming his skill and experience.  "I'm Birch Bayh," he said in his spots, "and I'm a politician."  The message failed badly.  On April 12, Newsweek reported:

And Bayh tried to counter this year's anti-politician sentiment by proclaiming that it would take a politician to solve the nation's problems, and that he was a good one. Somewhat lamely, his admen still say the theme was valid. But Roger Ailes, a commercial TV producer who worked on Nixon's 1968 campaign, says the Bayh strategy amounted to political suicide: "It was like going into a crowded room, announcing you have leprosy and then trying to shake hands with everyone."

It's probably good for Kasich to talk about his knowledge and experience, but he should probably avoid the p-word.