Beyond the Popular Vote: A Guide to the 2024 Presidential Election

On the 5^th of November this year, the United States will elect its next President.

So much is written and spoken about this quadrennial event, but what are the basic rules and why do they exist? What do the polls say and how seriously should we take them? How is the winner decided and when will we know the result?

This article briefly answers these questions and explains how they differ from Australian Federal elections.

How the election is run

In Australia, Federal elections are run by the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC), an independent statutory authority within the Australian Public Service. The AEC has a well-deserved reputation for impartiality, with a good track record in competence.

In the U.S., most of the detailed rules for conducting Federal elections (for President and for Congress) are set by the 50 states. Varying from state to state, these rules can be surprisingly complex and are becoming increasingly contentious along political party lines. There is therefore an increasing potential for disputes before the election, during the vote count and after the vote count.

In fact, after the 2020 Presidential election, there were more than 60 court cases on various disputed matters.

Who votes

In theory, the answer to this is simple – U.S. citizens aged 18 and over. But the reality is more complex.

As with the vast majority of countries outside Australia, voting in the U.S. is not compulsory. Turnout in the last Presidential election was 61.5% of the voting age population – this was the first time in 60 years that turnout had been over 60% (arguably attributable to the presence of Donald Trump, a figure who produces strong reactions, but that’s a theory for another paper!). By contrast, the 2022 Australian federal election saw just under 90% of voting age Australians vote – the lowest in a century.

In addition, the rules for registering to vote in the U.S. are also set by the states. In many places the rules are complex and hard to understand and can sometimes make it hard for certain demographic groups to register.

Moreover, U.S. elections are held on a Tuesday – a day on which, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, approximately 73% of employed Americans work – whereas Australians vote on Saturdays. While there are varied provisions for postal and absentee voting, it’s generally not as straightforward for an American to do that as it is for us here. Also, the individual states have implemented a plethora of rules around voters having to prove eligibility.

Hence there is added complexity in opinion polling: not only do the American pollsters have to work out who the interviewee will vote for, they need to take a view on whether the person is likely to vote at all or be able to vote – this second point is something Australian pollsters barely have to consider at all.

The voting system and the Electoral College

One basic distinction between the U.S. Presidential elections and our federal elections is the role of preferences. In Australian federal elections^[1] (and most state elections), voters allocate preferences and the winner is the candidate who eventually gets more than half the valid (or “formal”) votes cast, after all the less successful candidates have been eliminated one by one, and preferences distributed. This is often described as the winner on the “Two Candidate-Preferred” vote. The U.S. does not have a preferential voting system – what counts in each state^[2] is who gets the most first preference votes.

Another crucial feature of the U.S. Presidential election system is the Electoral College. In fact, it is the Electoral College, not the voters themselves, who elect the President.

Each state (plus the District of Columbia (DC), home of the national capital Washington DC) elects a certain number of delegates to the Electoral College. There are 538 delegates in total, meaning that a candidate needs 270 to win. This year, if Kamala Harris and Donald Trump tie at 269 each, the tie-breaking procedure^[3] is likely to mean Trump becomes President.

That number is set for each state as the sum of:

• the number of senators (set at two for each state); and
• the number of members of the House of Representatives (which varies from as few as one, for a number of the least populous states, to 52 for California, the most populous state).

For DC, the number of Electoral College votes is set at three.

This means the less populous states are over-represented in the Electoral College; a voter in the least populous state (Wyoming) has nearly four times the power of a voter in California.

For the most part, the less populous states are much more favourable for the Republicans than for the Democrats. It was not always thus – it was often the other way around until about 50 years ago.

Compounding this is the fact that nearly all the states^[4] elect their entire “slate” of delegates for one candidate or the other – this feature is referred to as “Winner Takes All”. In recent elections, the Democratic Party Presidential candidates have tended to win very big in their larger states, especially California, whereas Republicans have won more modest victories in their two biggest states, Texas and Florida.

The consequence? For Kamala Harris to win the election, she’ll likely need significantly more votes than Donald Trump to obtain an Electoral College majority.

Hillary Clinton’s presidential run in 2016 is a case in point; she won the overall popular vote by about two percentage points yet lost the Electoral College fairly narrowly. In 2020, Joe Biden won the overall popular vote by about 4.5 percentage points and only won the Electoral College by a small margin.

If this continues, it is reasonable to infer that the “break-even point” for Kamala Harris in 2024 might be somewhere in the order of a three-percentage point victory in the popular vote.

This also means that nation-wide opinion polls showing Kamala Harris with (say) a two to three-point lead^[5] may not be as favourable for her as they seem; this sort of polling result (if accurate) means that the candidates are neck-and-neck. One way to get more insight is to look at polls in the “swing states”^[6] that are likely to decide a close election.

Whilst Australian elections have been won by parties with less than half of the Two-Party Preferred vote, this is comparatively rare and there does not appear (in the federal sphere, at any rate) to be a systematic tilt to either side of politics.

What happens on the day – and afterwards

In Australian time, polls close and the counting starts on the 6^th of November. One of the first large states to close is Florida, and in the past two elections its result has been fairly apparent by about 3pm Australian Eastern Daylight Time (AEDT). Though Donald Trump is expected to win Florida by a clear margin, the size of the margin will still be a very significant indicator of likely results around the country (and, of course, if Kamala Harris wins Florida, then she is very likely to win the election).

However, if it’s close, and the polls suggest it will be, the election may well come down to the following states and places, which have the following number of electoral votes:

If things go as might be expected in a close election, Kamala Harris is likely to get 215 Electoral College votes from places other than those listed above, and Donald Trump 219. Harris will thus need 55 votes out of the 104 listed above to get to the winning number of 270. Trump will need 51 of these 104 to get to 270 although, as noted above, a 269-all Electoral College tie is likely to be good enough for him.

If the election is close, it will probably take some days for the outcome to be clear – in 2020, it took three to four days for the result to be clear. And in 2000, the closest election in living memory, it took several weeks for the result to emerge.

If the opinion polls are at all accurate, it will be take some time after election day for the new U.S. President to be known for sure.

References

^[1] What is being referred to is elections for the Lower House of Parliament (e.g., the Australian House of Representatives), which is where the Government is decided. Elections for the Upper House (e.g., the Senate) are much more complex and varied across the Australian jurisdictions.

^[2] See footnote 4 below.

^[3] The procedure is a vote in the House of Representatives where each state’s delegation has one vote.

^[4] The relatively small exceptions are Maine and Nebraska, where there are two Electoral College delegates elected by the overall state vote, and each House of Representatives (or Congressional) district elects one delegate.

^[5] This is about the current situation based on averages of nation-wide opinion polls.

^[6] See table of swing States below.

^[7] Noting the point above, Nebraska Congressional District 2 (CD2) elects one member of the Electoral College.

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