Trump is running ahead of Clinton right now. And he is running especially well among white men, especially those who ended their education with high school. But that’s not enough to win the election. White people are not as big a majority as they used to be. And with some strategic campaigning, it’s possible to win the White House without winning a majority of white people everywhere.
It has happened before. In fact, Mitt Romney won 60 percent of the white vote in 2012.
Changing Demographics
As you may have heard, the population of the United States is becoming more and more diverse. By 2044, white people will comprise less than half the population. In other words, the majority of voters will be members of minority groups.
In 2016, researchers estimate that 69 percent of eligible voters will be non-Hispanic whites, down from 2012, when they were 71 percent (no matter what race they are, the Census Bureau counts as Hispanic people whose origins are in Spanish-speaking countries, including Mexico, Central and South America and the Caribbean.)
The number of minority voters is growing faster than the number of non-Hispanic whites, especially among young people. Between 2012 and 2016, 16 million citizens reached voting age. Fifty-seven percent of them were non-Hispanic whites, while 43 percent were members of minority groups.
The Electoral College
Every state is allocated a number of electoral votes equal to the number of representatives it has in the House and the Senate. That means that the states with the largest populations have more electors.Every state gets at least three.
States with very large populations get more: Illinois gets 20, New York and Florida each get 29, while California gets 55. There’s a very cool interactive map of the states’ electors here.
All states except Maine and Nebraska use a “winner take all” system. This means that whichever candidate gets a majority of the votes in a state gets all its electoral votes.
This is what the electoral college vote looked like in 2012:
Note that it appears that much more of the territory went red. The reason is that except for Texas, the Republicans won states with lots of land mass, but fewer people.
The Blue Wall
The states with largest populations often have the highest minority populations. So if they vote blue, the Democrat gets lots of delegates. Some states are almost certain to vote either red or blue consistently. Eighteen states and the District of Columbia have voted Democratic in every presidential election since 1992. Some political pundits refer to those 18 states as the “blue wall.”
In 2016, they will have a total of 242 electoral votes. During the same period, 13 states have consistently voted Republican. They have a total of 102 delegates. If the blue wall holds, and minorities continue to favor Clinton over Trump as much as they did Clinton over Bernie Sanders, the election could be Clinton’s to lose.
https://youtu.be/zxNgdUtEaIg
Featured Image by U.S. Embassy Tel Aviv/CC by 2.0 And Michael Vadon/CC by SA-2.0
