In 2015, a Mississippi state house race ended in a tie, after which the winner was decided by drawing straws. A 2013 mayoral race in the Philippines was deadlocked and resolved with a coin toss. A 2013 legislative election in Austria was decided by a single vote, after wrangling over the validity of a ballot featuring a vulgar cartoon. Heck, I didn’t have to look far to find examples: In 1990, my own uncle lost his bid for Congress by less than 1 percent of the vote. [...]
I plotted the top two popular vote-getters in every U.S. presidential election since 1824, using data from The American Presidency Project. The top two contenders, typically a Democratic and a Republican, but occasionally a Whig, have danced closely around the 50-50 mark for nearly 100 years. Only four times since 1824 has the winner received more than 60 percent of the popular vote. Since 2000, the candidates have been separated by an average of 3.5 points. The median and average separations have been 8.2 and 9.5 points since 1824—a figure skewed upward due to a few outlying and not particularly close races. (The electoral tally doesn’t usually appear so close because the Electoral College tends to magnify differences in the popular vote.) [...]
There are other forces in play that could favor close elections. In congressional (as opposed to presidential) races, winning margins can be driven down by the uniquely American practice of gerrymandering districts. This is a process by which district boundaries are redrawn to the advantage of one political party. In general, parties will want to draw these boundaries so as to give the most seats to their side. But in so doing, giving a candidate with a cushy advantage in a safe district even more votes is essentially wasting those votes. A more efficient way to gerrymander is to create many districts that favor your party by slim (even uncomfortably slim) majorities, so you can rack up more seats with the same number of voters. This, in turn, can create close races when there wouldn’t otherwise have been one.
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