Could Trump Win the Popular Vote but Lose the Electoral College?

It’s not likely, but it’s not something that can be dismissed either, recent polling suggests.

Kamala Harris and Donald J. Trump are tied at 48 percent in the final New York Times/Siena College national poll of the cycle Friday.

When minor party candidates are included, Mr. Trump leads by one percentage point.

It goes without saying that this shows an extremely close race — and it’s not the only poll to do so. Over the last week or so, several high-quality polls have showed a tied race or even had Mr. Trump pulling ahead. A Wall Street Journal poll, for instance, found Mr. Trump up three points, while CNBC showed him two points ahead.

The New York Times’s polling average has Ms. Harris’s lead down to one point, as of late Thursday.

All of this raises a possibility that few people would have contemplated at the beginning of the cycle: a Trump victory in the national popular vote.

Democrats have won the national popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections — often enough for many to be lulled into the belief that Democrats have a lock on it. Many of these popular vote victories, however, have been close. A Republican win has been conceivable on several occasions, and even though it didn’t happen, it certainly could have under slightly different circumstances.

If Mr. Trump did win the popular vote this time, it would be straightforward to explain. The poll shows that Ms. Harris faces real headwinds — the kind that would ordinarily cost a candidate the election:

• Just 28 percent of voters say the country is on the right track. No party has retained the White House (or won the popular vote) when such a small share of voters think things are going well.
• President Biden’s approval rating is just 40 percent. No party has held the White House (or won the popular vote) when the president’s approval rating is that low.

There are deeper challenges for Ms. Harris as well. Mr. Trump has an advantage on voters’ most important issue, the economy, the poll says. And more generally, more voters say they trust him on whatever issue they care about most.

Of course, Ms. Harris could easily win the national vote. Mr. Trump has plenty of his own weaknesses — including some that have returned to the fore this week, like his former chief of staff John Kelly’s comment that he fit the definition of a fascist. But together, there’s more than enough here to make it easy to imagine a Trump popular vote victory.

Could Harris still win the Electoral College?

In 2016, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by two points but narrowly lost the presidency because Mr. Trump performed well in the relatively white working-class Midwestern battleground states.

Four years later, Mr. Biden won the Electoral College, but his disadvantage in the key states relative to the nation was actually even greater than Mrs. Clinton’s was in 2016. He won the national vote by 4.5 points, but he won the tipping-point state — Wisconsin — by only six-tenths of a point.

With that history in mind, Mr. Trump might seem like a certainty to win if the national vote were tied — let alone if he actually won the national vote. But it may not be quite the lock many believe it to be.

As we’ve reported for more than a year, there are a lot of signs that Mr. Trump’s advantage in the Electoral College is fading.

This is partly about demographics: Ms. Harris is holding up relatively well among white voters, who represent an outsize share of the vote in the key Northern battleground states.

It may also reflect something deeper, playing out state by state in the wake of the pandemic, the stop-the-steal movement and the end of Roe v. Wade. All of these events were felt very differently in different states, and they seemed to leave an unmistakable mark on the midterm map.

In 2022, Democrats did well in many key states where democracy and abortion were on the line, while Republicans ran up the score in uncompetitive states like Florida or New York. The polls have shown a similar pattern this cycle, with Ms. Harris holding up in the battlegrounds while Mr. Trump puts up double-digit leads in Florida.

As a result, I wouldn’t completely write off a Harris win in the Electoral College even if Mr. Trump narrowly won the popular vote. I’m absolutely not saying it’s likely. It may be a bit too much to ask Ms. Harris to sweep each of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan if she’s losing so much ground elsewhere in the nation. It may seem especially challenging in these particular states, as the polls have erred here in recent cycles. One also wonders whether the Arab American and Muslim population in Michigan, angry over the war in Gaza, might just get Mr. Trump over the edge in this scenario.

But at least in the polling, all the pieces for a Harris victory in the Midwest remain in place, even as her national lead keeps fading. Most obviously, the polls still show it: Ms. Harris is still tied in the Northern swing states, even as she’s barely ahead nationally.

The underlying explanations for a diminished edge for Mr. Trump in the Electoral College remain as well. He’s still making most or even all of his gains among Black and Hispanic voters, who are underrepresented in the Northern battlegrounds. He still shows his greatest strength in the noncompetitive states where Republicans did best in the midterms, like our recent Florida poll showing him up 13 points.

This same pattern even exists within national Times/Siena polls: In our national surveys, Mr. Trump makes huge gains in the places where Republicans excelled in the midterms; he makes no gains at all where Republicans struggled, which includes states like Pennsylvania.

None of this makes a Harris victory without a clear popular vote victory easy or likely. But I wouldn’t write it off either.