How Does the US Presidential Election System Work?
An Explainer for Everyone Else in the World
I’ve gotten a lot of questions from my international friends asking what’s going on with the presidential election. I hope this analogy to football (soccer) sheds a little light on the complex, sometimes messy process we in the United States go through every 4 years.
Imagine a continental football (soccer) federation tournament similar to the UEFA Nations League. We’ll call ours the NO-EFA Nations League (NNL). The NNL consists of 51 nations.
In the NNL, every nation sends its representative team to the tournament. When they send their team, they assign it one of three colors: red, purple, or blue. Which color the team gets is kind of complicated, but basically it’s based on tradition. Some nations always send a blue team, while some always send a red team. But a few nations never seem to be able to choose between red and blue, so they send a purple team. More about that later.
Once the NNL season starts, the teams don’t actually play one another. They just show up and draw up a table. Each team reports how they performed in a complicated system that assigns them points on the table. One might get 55 points, one only 3, and all the others get somewhere in-between.
Then the NNL organizers rank each team based on this metric. So, now you have a ranking of each 51 teams.
The NNL takes this table and rearranges it, grouping each team according to its respective color—a red group, a blue group, and a purple group. Then, the NNL combines all the points for each of these 3 groups. So, all the red teams’ points get added together, and so on. The goal is for one group to get a simple majority of the points: 51%.
In most seasons, you can tell whether the red group or blue group will come out with the winner. Like when Germany, France, Italy, and France all end up in different groups in the UEFA Nations League. Chances are, you already know who’s going to be in the semi-finals.
But in a rare season, the red and blue groups come out so close to each other that you have to bring in the purple group to get a winner. Essentially, they knock each other out of the tournament. Teams like Switzerland and Belgium suddenly become competitive. And everything gets really interesting!
So, now that red and blue are virtually tied, the purple teams each have more influence on the outcome. But for our leagues sake, we each had to decide whether they’re going to be part of the blue group or red group. Each team gets to choose only one color.
How do they choose? They go back to their fans and ask them to vote on it. Then they put on new jerseys—red or blue. Their respective table points are added to the original blue group or red group.
And there you have it: 2 groups — red and blue. The group with the most points wins the league.
The award? They get to name the league president for next season. They may get some other benefits, too. In any case, control.
Oh, I forgot to mention: each team has a different number of players. Some have 55, others just 3. Crap! Your team just ended up in the same group as Germany and France. Good luck advancing to the next round!
Then again, maybe your youth system just happens to produce a surprising bunch of really good players who can take down a behemoth. (Looking at you, Iceland!)
So, in this analogy, the national team (i.e., US state) with the highest points is always California. Why? Because it has the most points. Why? Because it has 55 players. Don’t think about it too much. Suffice it to say, California has a population of ca. 38 million. Wyoming has just over half a million!
So California automatically takes first place in the NNL table (i.e. the US presidential election). It so happens that California is traditionally almost always blue.
Second place goes to Texas, the state with the second-largest population. It’s traditionally always red.
Then Florida comes third, which is often purple, but you really never know.
New York is 4th, traditionally blue.
And so on.
States like Wyoming and Alaska are always at the bottom of the table with the fewest points. These are the Icelands and Luxemburgs of the groups in terms of population. In terms of politics, they’re traditionally red, so they can really only hope to push their red group over the top once the tallying comes. Otherwise, they’re unlikely to make much noise in the NNL.
States that are traditionally blue are California, Oregon, Washington, New York, Massachusetts, and pretty much all of New England.
States that are traditionally red are Texas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, North Dakota, South Dakota, Utah, Idaho, and pretty much all of the South — the so-called Bible Belt.
The interesting group is the purple group (“swing states”), since if the red (Republicans) and blue (Democrats) groups are tied at this point, these swing states can sway everything when they finally decide to become red or blue.
States that are often purple are Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, to name a few. (Hi again, Belgium and Switzerland! You, too, Croatia!) Basically, traditionally the states bordering the Great Lakes — the Rust Belt.
So, if you combine states together by their traditional choice, California and New York — the first and second most populous states — give big wins to the blue group.
Texas — the second most populous state — traditionally gives a big win to the red group.
Florida is in 4th place and is sometimes purple, but in recent history traditionally red. (Florida’s a bit like England. What are they gonna do this time around? Will they finally actually live up to their promise?)
These 4 states alone account for about 1/3 of the total “points” (electoral college votes).
Ohio and Pennsylvania are 5th and 6th, respectively, and also have a big impact. They’re also commonly purple, i.e. swing states. Add them into the mix and you’re accounting for about 50% of the electoral college.
During all of this, the NNL asks all the fans of every nation what color they think should win (state-wide popular votes).
And… in the end, the NNL basically just ignores the fan vote results. It was just a nice gesture. Makes great news and makes everyone think they’re part of the game. That’s because some states are traditionally so Democrat or Republican that the outcome is a forgone conclusion. It’s why some states announce which presidential candidate won the state’s support even before their popular votes are counted. Just look at West Virginia this time around. The polls had been closed for what, like 2 minutes and everyone up and called it for Trump? (West Virginia is, after all, called the “reddest state in the Union” for good reason.)
The only time popular vote really matters is in the swing states, i.e. if the red group and blue group are more or less tied when the “table points” (projected electoral college votes) are tallied. Only then do the fan votes of the purple states have any impact.
Otherwise, fans, “thanks for your money!” Now, as your concession prize for not advancing, just grab some popcorn and watch Belgium and Switzerland duke it out.
Of course, then there’s the complication that all of this “calling the winner” is technically still just conjecture because nothing counts until December, when the “electors,” i.e. representatives from each state, convene at the Electoral College to cast their votes for the presidential candidate of their state’s choosing, i.e. based on their state’s popular vote. That’s when the NNL draws up the table officially and tallies red vs. blue and declares the winner.
There are 538 electors in the Electoral College, with each state receiving a different number based more or less on on its population. It’s a tiny bit more complicated than this, but it wouldn’t be the United States if it weren’t ;)
So, a large state like California gets 55 points when they tabulate the analogous NNL table. Big state, more electors. Small state, fewer electors.
Now, the electors are supposed to vote for the party candidate that their state’s popular vote chose. But remember, as I said before, in some states, that’s a foregone conclusion. So — and here’s the rub — a given citizen’s vote doesn’t really matter for who gets elected president… unless they’re in a swing “purple” state. That’s because that purple state has to decide whether they’re on the blue team or the red team. So, in that state, individual citizens’ votes suddenly have a huge impact on the color of jersey the electors from that state will wear in the Electoral College (the NNL table — remember that, in the NNL, the teams never actually play a single game. They just show up and start counting the win-loss record in their national leagues. That’s akin to the electors showing up at the Electoral College).
OK, I said that the “purple” states have to choose between red and blue. That’s not completely true. They can choose one of many other colors (party presidential candidates), but for the most part, so-called third parties like the Libertarian or Green parties don’t play an all too important role in American politics. Let’s just say for brevity’s sake (ironic, I know, given the length of this article), that it’s either blue or red.
At the Electoral College meeting in December, the electors cast their votes. These 538 votes are added up by party, and you get the “red” group or “blue” group. The first group (political party) to get 270 elector votes — 51% — wins the presidency.
Now, all electors from a given state are supposed to vote in unison. So, this year California’s 48 electors are supposed to all vote for Biden.
But… it’s theoretically possible that an elector from any state decides to go rogue and vote for the other guy. Now, suddenly Trump or Biden gets a vote he “shouldn’t” have gotten. This elector is called a “faithless elector.”
There really are no laws preventing “faithless electors” — just tradition.
Recently some states have enacted laws to punish faithless electors, but these laws have no real teeth. Once the “faithless elector” casts his or her vote, that’s final. No take-backs!
So, technically speaking, the President isn’t elected until December, and no one can really know until then what will happen. Everything until then is technically statistical probabilities and opinion articles. And in the meantime, the “lame duck,” i.e. incumbent loser, can wreak all kinds of havoc to set his predecessor up for failure.
So, whichever way you lean, keep in mind that, during a hotly contested election like this one in 2020, we’re all going to have to wait until December — and even then until January 20th when the new President is sworn in — to see how things turn out. Until then, it’s all really just a guess.
Sorry to ruin the fun.
Now, you may be saying to yourself, “What the hell kind of system is this?”
Answer: one created in the late 1700s when information took weeks to travel. Democratic election (small “d,” i.e. popular vote) couldn’t always be counted on, since it was hard to gather all the votes from all the counties and districts in a state and pass them up to the federal level and so on. So states chose electors, a handful of citizens from their state—but who lived and worked where the government—who more or less voted for who they thought the people of their state would vote for. The vote tallies they got from back home swayed their decision, but ultimately the choice was their own.
But now we live in the day and age when information travels in nanoseconds. So why continue to use a system that seems woefully outdated?
That is one of the great mysteries of the United States and probably has something to do with the fact that one party or the other feels that changing the rules will somehow hurt their chances during the next NNL season.
Now, just don’t ask me to explain baseball.