If the 2022 Election Were a Presidential Election, Democrats Would Have Won the Electoral College but Lost the Popular Vote

If one calculates the vote for each major party candidate for the office at the top of the ballot in 2022, one finds that Republicans would have got the most popular votes. But applying those same results to the electoral vote for each state, Democrats would have won the electoral vote 280 to 258.

Adding up the vote for the top office in 2022, Republicans got 52,661,573 votes. Democrats got 50,328,897.

But Democrats got the greater popular vote in Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, D.C., Hawaii, Illinois, Kansas, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin, and they have 280 electoral votes. The states with the greater popular vote for Republicans in 2022, for the top-most office, only have 258 electoral votes.

The top-most office in 2022 is deemed to be Governor, for the states that elected a Governor in 2022. For the other states, U.S. Senate is the top-most office in Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, North Carolina, North Dakota, Utah, and Washington. In Delaware, Mississippi, Montana, New Jersey, Virginia, and West Virginia, there are no statewide races so U.S. House was at the top of the ballot. In the District of Columbia the top office is Delegate to the U.S. House.

Of course, the popular votes in 2022 aren’t all counted yet, but chances are the proportions won’t change. The basic reason that Democrats enjoyed an “electoral college” majority in 2022, with fewer popular votes, is that in so many Republican states the majority over the Democrat was huge; whereas in the Democratic states of 2022, the margins were relatively small, except notably California.

My 2022 national popular votes don’t include votes cast on the Working Families Party for Democratic nominees in Connecticut and New York, nor the Conservative vote for the Republican nominee in New York. But even if those votes were included, it would not have changed this analysis.


Comments

If the 2022 Election Were a Presidential Election, Democrats Would Have Won the Electoral College but Lost the Popular Vote — 24 Comments

  1. It’s interesting to note that in New York state, the Democrats overreached with their gerrymandering, imagining that they could capture more House seats, but ended up doing less well than expected there.

  2. There’s no such thing as a national “popular vote” in midterms. The only office people in every state can vote on (and that uses electors) is President of the United States.

  3. @Walter: the NY redistricting was done by the courts after Republicans challenged them and won. The result was more balanced and less favorable to Dems than what they attempted.

  4. @Saverio: Democrats obeyed the judge after he threw out their redistricting plan. In Red States like Florida, a judge threw out DeSantis’s radically-gerrymandered redistricting plan . . . and Florida used it anyway. Democrats CANNOT continue w/ this unilateral disarmament!

  5. Out of curiosity, does that result hold if you count Senate above Governor rather than vice versa? That would shrink the GOP vote margin a bit and increase the Dem EC result, I think. But by enough to make a difference to Rs still winning the “national” vote?

    Somebody asked me about that. Even though treating Gov above Sen as top of the ticket is probably right, for this comparison Senate results track presidential results more closely and have fewer big flipped outliers.

  6. ONE MORE ANTI-DEMOCRACY GERRYMANDER ELECTION —

    1/2 OR LESS VOTES X 1/2 RIGGED CRACKED/PACKED GERRYMANDER AREAS = 1/4 OR LESS CONTROL

    SUPER-WORSE PRIMARY MATH

    SUPER-WORSE USA SENATE MATH

    >>> MORE LAWLESS MONARCH/OLIGARCH EXECS/JUDICS IN REAL CONTROL OF THE COMMIE/FASCIST AGENDAS.

    LAST HOPE — THE 18 STATES WITH VOTER PETS FOR STATE CONST AMDTS

    PRT
    APPV
    TOTSOP

  7. Andy, only two-thirds of the states had a US Senate election, so one can’t really just use US Senate.

  8. If I had deemed US Senate to be the top-most office, the results would have been the same. Democrats would have received 293 electoral votes and Republicans would have received 245 electoral votes. Yet Republicans would have had the most popular votes.

    The states that would have been switched are: to the Republicans, Wisconsin and Kansas; to the Democrats, Georgia, Nevada, New Hampshire, and Vermont.

  9. I re-calculated, using US Senator instead of Governor in all the states that had both offices up. The results are the same: Democrats lost the popular vote 51,458,953 to 52,187,613. But they won the “electoral vote” 293 to 245.

  10. Thanks. Yes, that’s what I meant, treating Sen as the higher office than Governor for this purpose.

  11. Using the Wyoming Rule, there would have been 573 House seats based on the 2020 census, according to the calculation in Wikipedia.

    So, RW, if the Wyoming Rule had been in effect, would your results have been the same?

  12. Why are communists allowed to breathe, much less walk around freely or post lies on the internet?

  13. I didn’t expect to agree with a friendly libertarian but on this matter I do.

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