Toward Another Photo Finish

Charlie Cook: “The presidential election now looks likely to be a photo-finish, quite possibly resulting in the third Electoral College ‘inversion’ in the last seven elections. Only three times during the 1700s, 1800s, and 1900s did one major party candidate win the national popular vote and the other the Electoral College vote—1824, 1876, and 1888. It took 112 years for it to happen again, when George W. Bush lost the popular vote but beat Al Gore by 537 votes in Florida, winning the decisive 25 electoral votes in the Sunshine State.”

“Sixteen years later, it happened again, as Trump benefited from an inversion over Hillary Clinton. In 2020, we dodged a second consecutive inversion by only about 43,000 votes spread out over three states. Indeed, we’ve gone from inversions as a historical anomaly to a scenario we’ve almost come to expect every four years.”