How each election's map would look like if the PV was tied

[twenty42]

Great topic. Here are some of my observations.

--Out of these 14 elections, each party has had the EC advantage seven times. This tells me the stat is pretty random and self-correcting, and that there is no long-term inherent EC advantage for either party.

--The party with the EC advantage has won nine out of the 14 elections (64.3% frequency). So while having the EC advantage may give you an edge, it is certainly not necessary to win.

--Ronald Reagan may have run up his EV total with a lot of narrow wins in 1980, but it was still one of the great upsets of presidential election history. If the national polls leading up to the election turned out to be correct, Carter could've very well been reelected while losing the PV.

--The 1992-2012 "Blue Wall" had some cracks in it, even though they were invisible. NJ voted to the right of the nation in 1992, WI voted to the right of the nation in 1992 & 2000, and OR voted to the right of the nation in 1996 & 2000.

--There really is no such thing as uniform swing from one election to another. While most people on this forum...myself included...like to mentally masturbate over past election results and try to use them to determine the future, you really can't. The entire reason these maps exist is because states change relative to the nation from one election to the next. Would anybody have ever thought after 2012 that a 2.1% Democratic victory in the PV would only get them to 232 EV's?

[twenty42]

This makes me think - what the heck was Romney's path to 270?

I remember thinking the election was going to be close, but looking back at it, Romney had a 0.1% shot to win. I could see him getting to 266 (VA, OH, FL) but nothing passed that.

IA was pretty hard fought...Obama overperformed there in the final margins.

But yes, Romney really had nowhere to go other than that exact path. A PV/EV split favoring the Democrats was very possible that year...there was an hour or so there after the election was called for Obama that networks were reporting that Romney would probably end up winning the PV.