Why Trump Had an Edge In the Electoral College

Nate Cohn: “Liberals say Mr. Trump’s victory is proof that the Electoral College is biased against big states and undemocratically marginalizes urban and nonwhite voters. Conservatives say the Electoral College serves as a necessary bulwark against big states, preventing California in particular from imposing ‘something like colonial rule over the rest of the nation,’ as the conservative analyst Michael Barone put it. California sided with Mrs. Clinton by a vote margin of four million, or 30 percentage points.”

“Both sides have a point. But in the end, Mr. Trump won for a simple reason: The Electoral College’s (largely) winner-take-all design gives a lot of weight to battleground states. Mr. Trump had an advantage in the traditional battlegrounds because most are whiter and less educated than the country as a whole.”