This is the third time since World War II that the winner of the election actually carried a majority in fewer states than the loser.
As I noted four years ago, Hillary Clinton’s margin of victory in the national popular vote was entirely the product of her lopsided margin in California — just as had been true of Al Gore in 2000. In the other 49 states plus D.C., Donald Trump beat Hillary by 1,401,454 votes, 47.60 percent to 46.46 percent. Much of the current progressive complaint about the Electoral College and the Senate is really just a complaint about California’s inability to impose its peculiar and unrepresentative politics on the rest of the nation. (Not so in the House, where Californians are the speaker and the minority leader). This year, California was again a large component of Joe Biden’s national majority, but even without the Golden State, Biden wins the popular vote by 1,956,455 votes, a margin of 49.76 percent to 48.37 percent — no longer a majority, but still distinctly outdistancing Trump. And that, of course, is all the difference — the heart of this race was, yet again, in the Midwest. Even so, Biden won a majority of the vote in 21 states, compared to 24 for Trump. This is the third time since World War II that the winner of the election actually carried a majority in fewer states than the loser, the others being the Kennedy–Nixon race in 1960 and Carter–Ford in 1976:
This was also the first time since 1880 that the winner and loser of the election each carried the same number of states (excluding D.C.), although both Nixon in 1960 and Ford in 1976 each won more states than the winner of the election — and both of them won California.
Democratic triumphalism about having a natural majority is likewise a feature of dominating California. In eleven national elections dating back to 1980, the Democratic candidate has won a majority of the vote outside of California just once, that being Barack Obama in 2008. On the Republican side, George W. Bush in 2004 is still the only Republican in the last seven elections to win a majority outside of California. The rest of the country is still much more a 50–50 nation. Our institutions are designed to prevent the domination of hyperpartisan enclaves that are out of step with the nation. The South went for Grover Cleveland by 26 points in 1888, giving Cleveland a narrow edge in the national popular vote; he still lost. In 1860, Abraham Lincoln was held a shade below 40 percent of the national popular vote because he was not even on the ballot in many southern states. In each case, the Republican nonetheless won a majority in the Electoral College, preventing the regional supermajorities in the South from rendering the rest of the country’s vote moot.
The 1-2 punch of high turnout in California and Biden winning 63.45 percent of the vote there — the fourth-highest ever in California, trailing only to FDR in 1936, Warren Harding in 1920, and Herbert Hoover in 1928 — meant that the 11.1 million Californians who voted for the Biden-Harris ticket made up 13.67 percent of all Biden voters. That’s the second-highest share of a candidate’s vote from a single state since the end of Reconstruction, trailing only Al Smith in New York in 1928:
