Hillary Clinton’s Electoral College problem, explained
Matthew Yglesias
27 Mins Ago
Vox
Hillary Clinton is up in the polls. Indeed, up by more than
Barack Obama was the weekend before Election Day in 2012. That's why by all accounts she remains the odds-on favorite to win the election on Tuesday.
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But the electoral coalition at her back, though broadly similar to Obama's, is a bit different. Her support with African Americans appears a bit lower, and black turnout is also likely to be lower. Obama lost white voters without college degrees, but Clinton is set to lose them by an even larger margin. She's making that up with better performances with Hispanics and with white college graduates. Her lead in the polls shows that you can certainly build a winning coalition along these lines.
The problem, however, is that Clinton's version of the coalition is distributed inefficiently from a geographical point of view. Compared with Obama, she's weaker in key battleground states that he won, and stronger in red states that he lost. That's why at moments when she was riding high in the polls, she sometimes seemed to be on the verge of a landslide in which she could carry Arizona and Georgia — even putting Texas into play. But it also means that an election that is tied or nearly tied in the popular vote is likely one in which Trump beats her to 270 electoral votes.
The white working class is big in swing states
There's historically been a substantial regional difference in white working-class voting patterns, with Democrats getting nearly no votes from whites without a college degree in the South but faring considerably better in the North.
Trump's biggest electoral strength has been adding more white working-class voters who aren't Southerners or devout evangelical Christians into the GOP field.
These voters, fortunately for him, are quite numerous in Iowa, Ohio, Nevada, and Maine's Second Congressional District, which allocates its electoral vote independently from the statewide winner. They also mean that Trump is polling better in Pennsylvania and Michigan than Mitt Romney ever did.
If Clinton wins the overall popular vote by 2 or 3 or 4 points, this almost certainly won't matter. But it means that a very tight race in several states could put Trump over the top in scenarios where Romney would have lost.
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