The Power of Thinking on the Margin
Because I understand the power of one vote–it’s very close to zero–I always vote in Presidential elections for the candidate who’s closest to my views. The first time I was able to vote in a Presidential election was in 1988 and from then until now I have voted for the Libertarian Party candidate.
That’s where thinking on the margin has led me.
But Presidential candidates have a much thicker margin. They make hundreds of decisions–about where to speak, how to debate, and what to say. When they are incumbents, they have a large input on many policy issues that can affect the outcome of the election.
Health economist (and friend) John C. Goodman sent me an email Monday with the provocative title “Why Trump lost the Election: Health Care.”
In it, he writes:
The editors of the Wall Street Journal, the editor of National Review (Rich Lowry) and John Goodman all agree: Trump didn’t endorse the plan outlined by Goodman and Heritage Foundation scholar, Marie Fishpaw.
Oops.
Trump actually did the things Goodman and Fishpaw recommended, including allowing people to talk to their doctors by phone, email, and Skype; allowing employees to have access to 24/7 primary care as an alternative to the emergency room; and allowing employer-provided health insurance to be personal and portable. But Trump never talked about any of this. So, he didn’t get credit for any of it.
I think John is right. But one could also say that if he hadn’t been so incredibly rude and nasty in the first debate, he would have won also. (Although we now know in retrospect that Trump was probably awfully sick with COVID-19 during that first debate. When you’re sick, you tend to let out your inner self. And Trump’s inner self is nasty.)
Consider the fact that if Trump had received just 43,000 more votes, properly distributed, in Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin, he would have won the electoral votes of those three states. That’s a total of 37 electoral votes. Had Trump won those, he would have had 269 to Biden’s, wait for it, 269.
What would have happened then? It would have been thrown into the House of Representatives where each state delegation gets one vote. So California gets one vote and Rhode Island and Montana each get one vote. Etc. The vote is based on the November 2020 election results. Based on those results, Republicans had 26 votes. In that case, Trump would have won.
Interestingly, though, he might have had Kamala Harris as his Veep because the vote for Veep would have been by U.S. Senators. This is unclear, though, because the Senate is tied 50-50. Does anyone who reads this know?
Now back to the main point: Trump’s thick margin. As Holman Jenkins pointed out in an aptly titled Wall Street Journal opinion piece, “Trump Threw it Away,” January 6, 2021, Trump almost won. Jenkins wrote:
Of course the microscopic margin rankles—he lost the pivotal electoral votes of Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin by fewer than 43,000 votes. He has every reason to be beside himself since he absurdly oversupplied these voters with reasons to vote against him and he still almost won.
Imagine a team so bad and good at the same time that it would have prevailed if it had fumbled the ball 1% fewer times in its own endzone.
Imagine what would have happened if Trump had been neutral, not nice but simply neutral, to the memory of John McCain. He probably would have won Arizona. (Of course, that’s like asking what would have happened if Trump hadn’t been Trump.) What if he had pointed out the record growth in median incomes for various minority groups? He might have won Georgia. What if had actually run a campaign based on his accomplishments up to the end of 2019? He might have won Wisconsin. Etc.
So although we voters can’t individually affect the outcome, candidates can influence the outcome with a few key decisions.
Here’s the longer John C. Goodman piece.
READER COMMENTS
Andronicus
Feb 3 2021 at 5:12pm
On the Senate being tied 50-50, I believe the Vice-President (then Mike Pence) would have tossed the tie-breaking vote. The Vice-President casts a vote to break any ties in the Senate, as determined by Article I, section 3 of the Constitution. That is, if I’m remembering my AP US Gov correctly!
KevinDC
Feb 3 2021 at 5:40pm
From my understanding the whole process works like this.
If a new Vice President has been chosen by the Senate but the House hasn’t made up its mind about the President, then the new Vice President becomes Acting President while the VP office remains vacant until the House makes a decision. If neither the House nor the Senate have made a decision, then the Speaker of the House becomes Acting President until at least one branch of Congress makes a decision, again leaving the VP spot vacant. If a new VP is picked before the President, the new VP will take the office of the President away from the Speaker, but the VP role will be left unfilled* until a new President is picked. But if I understand correctly, if a President is picked but a new VP isn’t, the office of Vice President will simply remain empty – nobody is automatically allotted into the VP position the way they are for the Presidency. While not entirely common, office of the VP has been vacant a dozen or so times before. If that turns out to be a long term situation, I think the biggest consequence is that 50-50 legislation simply fails to pass without the VP to cast a tiebreaking vote.
*This is more of a de facto than a de jure situation. Technically in this case, the office of the VP is filled, but the VP assumes the powers and duties of the office of the Presidency, but not the official role of President. De facto we have a someone in the role of President and nobody in the role of Vice President, but de jure the Office of the President is still vacant and the new VP only holds the powers and duties of the office, not the office itself. Meanwhile, the powers and duties of the Vice Presidency are left vacant, even though the office itself is technically filled. It’s a bit of a weird system.
robc
Feb 3 2021 at 7:11pm
The more interesting case in a tie is faithless electors. In that case, the House chooses from top 3 electoral college vote getters. Would someone have gotten a movement to pick someone else? From either party…or both?
Michael
Feb 4 2021 at 6:36am
I think it would have been Pence.
When the new Congress (117th) began on Jan 3rd, the GOP had a 51-48 Senate majority. There were 50 GOP and 48 Democratic Senators whose terms extended through the 117th Congress.
Then there were the 2 Senate seats from Georgia.
David Perdue’s term expired at the end of the 116th Congress, but even though he won a plurality of the vote in November, he failed to win a majority, so under Georgia election rules he had to face the runner up, Jon Ossoff, in a runoff election on Jan 5th, with the winner being elected to a full Senate term. Until that election was held and the winner certified, the seat would remain vacant.
The other Georgia seat had been held by Republican Johnny Isakson, who was last elected in 2016, until he resigned a year or so ago for health reasons. Republican Kelly Loeffler was appointed to take his place, but under Georgia election law she could not serve the rest of Isakson’s term through 2022, but only until a special election was held. The special election was held on election day 2020 and it was a jungle primary style election with multiple candidates from each party on the ballot. Democrat Raphael Warnock won a plurality but not a majority, so, he, too, needed to compete in a runoff election against the runner up (Loeffler). But, unlike the other seat, which stayed vacant because Purdue’s term had expired, Loffler was able to continue to serve until the winner of the election was certified by the state of GA.
The Jan 5th runoff elections were won by Democrats Warnock and Ossoff, leading to the 50/50 split in the Senate. But the election results were not certified until after Joe Biden’s inauguration. So the Senate vote to elect the VP would have happened while the Senate was held by the GOP, 51-48. Pence would have received all 51 Republican votes.
Had the Senate been 50/50 starting on Jan 3rd, I don’t know what wuld have resulted. The 12th Amendment does not state outright that the VP is allowed to cast a tie-breaking vote. But the Constitution does state that the Senate is allowed to set its own rules and that the VP is President of the Senate and can cast a tie-breaking vote in other situations. My guess is that one of 2 things would have happened: 1) Pence would have cast the tie-breaking vote for himself and it would have withstood legal scrutiny (courts might have called it a nonjusticiable political question), 2) Democratic Senators would have reached some sort of deal with the Republicans in which one or more of them agreed to vote for Pence in exchange for some other consideration, or 3) Pence would have gone out of office and there would be no VP.
Thomas Hutcheson
Feb 4 2021 at 9:50am
The basic problem is to have a system so fragile that With a landslide in popular vote, could result in which the re-allocation of a few thousand votes could have led to Biden’s losing the Presidency and give Trump the hope of changing the results.
Philo
Feb 4 2021 at 1:39pm
Holman Jenkins’ piece ran in 2021, not 2020.
David Henderson
Feb 4 2021 at 5:55pm
Thanks, Philo. Correction made.
Scott Sumner
Feb 4 2021 at 2:14pm
Trump repealed the Cadillac tax on health insurance, a move that did 10 times more harm than all the good from his other moves on health care.
Agree on the election–with a slightly less inept campaign Trump could have won. Ironically, Biden probably would have won in 2016.
David Henderson
Feb 4 2021 at 5:55pm
Hmmm. Maybe. I would like to see the argument spelled out.
Dennis H
Feb 8 2021 at 8:49pm
“So although we voters can’t individually affect the outcome, candidates can influence the outcome with a few key decisions”. It seems to me that this is at least part of what the Founding Fathers had in mind when they created the Electoral College thus making our nation a republic.
I also vote for the person/issue instead of party (though I wasn’t always this “independent” politically speaking). It’s so freeing to know that I can feel good knowing that who I vote for I can truly get behind instead of the “hold my nose” voting that I’ve come to loathe.
By the way, I don’t think I ever got your thoughts about comparing the Electoral College to “first past the post” a la Canada.
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