{"id":450622,"date":"2020-09-11T13:06:53","date_gmt":"2020-09-11T17:06:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/?p=450622"},"modified":"2020-09-14T15:55:19","modified_gmt":"2020-09-14T19:55:19","slug":"happens-when-one-candidate-wins-the-popular-vote-but-not-the-electoral-college-450622","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/happens-when-one-candidate-wins-the-popular-vote-but-not-the-electoral-college-450622\/","title":{"rendered":"D\u00e9j\u00e0 vu: What happens to America when one candidate wins the popular vote but not the Electoral College?"},"content":{"rendered":"

If this November again one presidential candidate wins the popular vote\u2014but the other the Electoral College and thus the US presidency\u2014the political damage would be \u201csubstantial,\u201d a group of political scientists from the Universities of Rochester<\/a>, Chicago, Stanford, and Dartmouth College argue in a new working paper<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The research team<\/a>, among them Gretchen Helmke<\/a>, a professor of political science at the University of Rochester and Mitchell Sanders<\/a> \u201997 (PhD) of Meliora Research, has banded together as Bright Line Watch<\/a>, a nonpartisan watchdog group that regularly surveys experts and the public on the health of US democracy. The team discovered that, in particular, Democrats would find the process \u201cless legitimate.\u201d<\/p>\n

In an analysis for the Washington Post\u2019s Monkey Cage<\/em> site<\/a>, the authors point to their prior research<\/a>, according to which Americans overwhelmingly embrace the principle that all votes should count equally. They write that for a candidate to win the most votes but go on to lose the election\u2014violates this principle.<\/p>\n

Yet, in the last five presidential elections precisely this happened twice (Gore\/Bush and Clinton\/Trump). Analyses this summer by some political observers (for example, the Economist<\/a> and FiveThirtyEight<\/a>) indicate that President Donald Trump may lose the popular vote to Democratic candidate Joe Biden but win the Electoral College.<\/p>\n

Read more of Bright Line Watch\u2019s analysis<\/a> in the Washington Post.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Political scientists explore how the November election will be viewed if there\u2019s a split between the popular vote and the Electoral College count.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":942,"featured_media":450882,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29212],"tags":[38522,21462,29492,16072],"class_list":["post-450622","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-voices-opinion","tag-bright-line-watch","tag-department-of-political-science","tag-gretchen-helmke","tag-school-of-arts-and-sciences"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nD\u00e9j\u00e0 vu: What happens to America when one candidate wins the popular vote but not the Electoral College?<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Scholars from the University of Rochester analyze the effects of a split between the popular vote and the Electoral College outcome.\" 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