We decided to find out. A candidate only needs to win the 11 states with the most electoral votes to hit 270. Assuming a candidate won all of those states by just one vote, and then didn't win a single vote in any of the other states (or D.C.), how many votes would that candidate have to win?
Based on 2012 data, the answer is: 27 percent. [...]
We're making a lot of assumptions here — we're using vote totals from 2012, for one thing. Moreover, we're assuming there are only two candidates in the race, which, of course, is not the case this year. [...]
Skewed wins like this happen regularly in U.S. elections — a modest popular vote margin can yield a ridiculously large Electoral College margin. For example, in 1984, Ronald Reagan beat Walter Mondale in the popular vote by 18 points — a sizable gap, but nothing like the Electoral College walloping: Reagan won 525 electoral votes, beating Mondale by 95 percentage points. [...]
Ironically, the 2000 election — whose outcome struck many people as unfair because Gore won the popular vote but not the electoral vote — also has the electoral-vote margin that most closely reflects the popular-vote margin. In that sense, one could call it one of the "fairest" elections in modern politics.
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