These periods were selected to exclude eras when one party typically won in a landslide. The paper as a whole studies three periods in American history: the Antebellum period from 1836 to 1852, the Reconstruction period from 1872 to 1888, and the modern period from 1964 to 2016 (although many of their modern samples only look at the period from 1988 to 2016). To reach their conclusions, the research team ran hundreds of thousands of simulated elections under various election models. The study is authored by University of Texas at Austin economics professors Michael Geruso and Dean Spears, and Geruso’s research assistant Ishaana Talesara, who is also a student at UT Austin. At the extremes, the chart suggests that there is still a small chance of a Republican victory even in elections where Democrats win the popular vote by about six points. Notice that the chance of a GOP victory reaches 50 percent when Republicans have less than 50 percent of the vote. The chart shows the probability of a Republican Electoral College victory across 92 different models. Indeed, to understand the magnitude of the GOP’s advantage in the Electoral College, consider this chart: Michael Geruso, Dean Spears, and Ishaana Talesara “A 3.0 point margin favoring the Democrat,” the study concludes, “is associated with a 16% inversion probability.” In other words, Republicans will win nearly one in six presidential races where they lose the popular vote by 3 points. This Republican advantage can shift elections where the Democrat was a fairly clear winner in the popular vote. “In the modern period,” the study suggests, “Republicans should be expected to win 65% of Presidential contests in which they narrowly lose the popular vote.” Republicans, moreover, are far more likely to benefit from an inversion than Democrats. In modern elections where one party prevails by just 2 points in the two-party popular vote, “inversions are expected in more than 30% of elections.” That number rises to 40 percent in elections with a 1 percentage-point margin. The study, by three economics researchers at the University of Texas, quantifies just how often the Electoral College will produce an “inversion” - that is, an election where one candidate wins the popular vote but the other walks away with the presidency. They are the kind of results we should expect from the Electoral College. According to a new study, these are not flukes. In 2016, Donald Trump won the presidency despite receiving nearly 3 million fewer votes than Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.
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