Dear The World:
Our United States Election in 2016 was REALLY close. Here are some facts so you don’t forget that.
Can you imagine a basketball foul shooting contest where the first team to sink 1,796 baskets would win, and each team was tied at 1,795? Hold that thought.
Here’s a better number for you.
38,873
Why that number? If only 38,873 people had voted differently in the 2016 United States general election, from Republican to Democrat, Hillary Clinton would be president. Over thirty eight thousand — does that sound like a lot? At first blush, it might FEEL like a lot, but it’s really not.
Obviously Americans have a crystal clear notion of what happened in their own election, but for those of you (i.e. The World) not living here, this small discussion will give you some interesting facts about our last United States presidential contest, lest we not forget. Just keep that number in mind — 38,873
Why bring this up now, nearly 6 months AFTER the election? Well, humans have a hard time processing the deeper significance of three types of numbers: 1) Very Large Numbers; 2) Very Small Numbers (fractions and decimals); 3) US Electoral College Results. All three play a part in understanding our last election. And apparently interest in the election of 2016 is still a hot topic. People in the US, at least, can’t stop talking about it. So, here are the raw facts about what “The Americans” did on November 8, 2016.
I’m going to stick with just the facts — and then I’ll add in a few analogies based purely on those facts.
(If you want to look up the facts for yourself go to www.archives.gov or www.wikepedia.org.)
First I will just throw some numbers at you with a little commentary — but probably you will just glaze over when you read them. So let the numbers sink in, and then we’ll give you some small little brain pictures later that will help you to put them in context.
Here is your first set of facts. The actual US National General Election results from 2016.
Yes, we have primarily a two party system here (Republicans, who ran Trump/Pence, and Democrats, who ran Clinton/Kane,) but other candidates in various states could make the ballot, and some candidates did in various states. We will concentrate on the two major party candidates, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.
If you just look at the popular vote, Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump by 2,868,519 votes. (Over two million, eight hundred thousand.) We will put that into perspective later. It’s one of those “Large Numbers” that are a little deceiving. And of course this is not how we pick our president. Indeed each candidate might have campaigned differently if we did choose a president this way. (Incidentally, also as a matter of fact, there is literally zero evidence, of any kind, that any illegal voters or outside groups actually altered this number by either voting illegally or hacking voting machines. That didn’t happen.) These are the raw vote totals.
Here are some other related facts about November 8, 2016.
Things to note: Around 83 million eligible voters didn’t even vote. I don’t know why they didn’t — it’s just a fact that they didn’t. Also note that of the 325 million people in the county, a little less than a third of them are not eligible to vote. Of course this includes children, but also (in many states) convicted felons and immigrants either here illegally or with legal green cards or visas, and people who have never bothered to register to vote. I guess you can say that those who CAN vote make a lot of choices for those who can’t.
Now, let’s talk about the Electoral College a little. Again, consult others on the comparative wisdom or lack thereof for a system that makes each state “Winner Take All” — but that’s how we do it. Each state is like its own football match. All you have to do is win the vote total by one in any given state (you know, score more goals than the other team) and all of that state’s electoral votes are yours. (OK, we have a very few states that do in fact divide electoral votes, but as far as Electoral Math and how you win an election, Winner Take All predominates.) However, the electoral TOTALS can be deceiving, much like the win-loss record of a sports team doesn’t tell you whether they are killing everybody, or winning by the skin of their teeth each time.
First, let’s just look at the history of electoral “victories”. Again, this IS how you win in the US. Here are totals for the last 40 years.
Here are the same results, same years, ranked by the actual size of the Electoral College margin, with the biggest margin on the top, listed in descending order, with the 2016 election highlighted.
Some of those margins are pretty big, and some of them pretty small. And in truth, the margin doesn’t matter. If you win with Electoral College Totals, you win the election.
But remember, these totals don’t really reflect how close the election was, or how close the vote was to get those electoral victories.
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For example, famously in 2000, in the election with the “hanging chads” in Florida (basically a wonky ballot) there was a recount that was very close. Also famously, in a vote of 5 to 4 with the US Supreme Court, for some reason the ballot counting was stopped short of completion (this was highly contentious.) However, when all the teeth-gnashing was over, George W. Bush won. Yes, it was a very close margin, but George W. Bush was the winner as surely as if he had won every single vote in Florida. In that election, just a handful of voters in Florida, maybe a few hundred, turned the tide of history. 2016 wasn’t that close, but if you look at the large numbers (millions and millions of voters) it was still very, very tight.
So, how close was the election of 2016 really? We know that Hillary Clinton won a popular vote that counted for nothing. And we know that, at least looking back over the last 40 years, Donald Trump had the 4th smallest electoral margin. But what decided that margin?
As it turns out, there were three states that were “traditionally” Democratic that went for the Republicans — Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. And it is generally accepted here that those three states made the difference for Trump. He needed all three to win, and he got them. But how close was it in each state?
You can see that there are 46 Electoral votes in these 3 states, and Trump got them all. Note that Electoral votes are kind of a zero-sum proposition. If you don’t get them, somebody else does. So if Trump had lost these 46 Electoral votes, his total would decline by 46, and Clinton’s would have increased by 46 — a net difference of 92. Had Trump lost all three states, Clinton would have won the election.
Looking at the vote totals in those states, you can see that there was a margin of 77,744 votes in favor of Trump out of 13, 233,377 votes cast for both candidates. But with the same zero-sum logic, it would have taken 38,873 people to change their votes from Trump to Clinton, and Clinton would have won. (You divide 77,744 in half, and then add one.)
So that’s where our magic number comes from. The votes of 38, 873 voters (spread over those 3 states) decided the election. Thirty eight thousand, eight hundred and seventy three.
So how big or small is that?
In Florida there is a new baseball stadium for the Miami Marlins (called Marlin’s Park.) and at capacity it holds a little over 38,000 fans. It’s a smallish ballpark by major league standards, but for the sake of illustration let’s just say that on a busy day, we can fill that stadium with 38, 873 fans.
I use that illustration because you can kind of get your head around it. Most of us have been at a sporting event with lots of people. And a crowd of nearly 39,000 is pretty big, but it’s not massive. Met Life Stadium (where the New York Giants and Jets play) holds nearly 80,000 fans on a Sunday afternoon in the fall. So 38, 873 is a lot, but not too much to imagine. Below is a picture of the Marlin’s stadium filled to capacity.
Now, let’s further imagine that we have a road lined with stadiums just like Marlins Park, all on one side of the road, and we’ll give about a quarter of a mile for each stadium. Let’s color them, too. First a Red one, then a Blue one, on and on. Red, Blue, Red, Blue — Trump voters, Clinton voters. They are not packed in too tightly, but if you’re riding down the road at 60 miles (80 kilometers) an hour, you will pass 4 absolutely packed stadiums in each minute. (Red, Blue, Red, Blue.) That’s clearly a lot of people. So let’s begin our journey. We can start in Miami and drive north. We’ll keep it at 60 miles an hour.
Let’s just say that our first set of stadiums will be filled with voters from Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. At 60 miles an hour we would drive well past West Palm Beach, for 85 miles (in 85 minutes) We would pass by 340 stadiums. And the very last one, nearly an hour and a half into our trip, would be filled with the last set of voters who, had they switched from “Red” to “Blue” would have changed the course of the election. We’ll color that stadium gold — our golden voters.
You would ride from Miami, through Fort Lauderdale, through Boca Raton (nice place!!) passing 4 packed stadiums a minute for nearly an hour and half, and that last stadium, the golden one, that you pass (it’s behind you in 15 seconds,) holds the key to the election. And that’s just the voters in those three key states.
But for the sake of argument, let’s make that golden stadium disappear, and we’ll use it later.
Let’s now line up all of the rest of the American voters to get a sense of how big 128 million really is. So let’s add more stadiums for all the other actual voters. .
To pass all the rest of the American voters from 2016, you would need another 743 miles — through Florida, through Georgia, through South Carolina, and well into North Carolina (almost exactly to Durham, NC). On a road passing 4 packed stadiums (Red, Blue, Red, Blue) each minute. And when all that was done, you’ve now travelled nearly 828 miles in over 13 hours of nonstop 60 miles an hour driving.
Well, actually about 18 miles from the end (with 72 stadiums to go) a funny thing does happen. There are no more Red stadiums. They are all Blue — all Hillary voters. This accounts for the difference in the popular vote. So for that last 18 miles we will only see Blue stadiums.
But finally, now we relocate our influential voters in the golden stadium. It’s the last stadium. It takes us 15 seconds to pass from beginning to end. It holds 38,873 voters out of the 128 million who cast ballots. And if their votes were switched, the election results would have been different. Hillary Clinton would have been the 45th president of the United States. But the golden voters voted the way they did, and Trump got the victory. It’s just — it was really, really close.
Large numbers, small numbers, and the Electoral College.
He’s one other sports analogy that may bring this margin into clearer focus.
For this analogy we’ll ignore the popular vote difference. But just to give you a sense of scale: If two basketball teams (one Red, one Blue) had a foul shooting contest where each basket was worth 38, 873 votes, the score would be tied after each team sank 1,795 foul shots. It would be tied. And one last foul shot? That would decide the whole thing.
That’s how close our US election was on November 8, 2016, in case you’re wondering. It was one bouncing ball on the rim after a total of 3,590 foul shots.
In the end, 62,985,106 voters against a population of 325,696,260 (that’s 63 million out of 325 million) — 19.3% of “Americans,” voted for Donald Trump. The election was actually decided by 0.011 percent of the population (11 thousandths of a percent), or 0.028 percent of those who voted. Those percentages are pretty small, and hard to comprehend on their own. But hopefully now you can put them in context. It was a very, very close election.
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Note: Electoral Charts error fixed 19 Apr 2017
