I have no idea what is going to happen on election day. Too many variables and I don’t trust polls any more since 2016.
Nobody seems to be taking the outcome that the EC ties very seriously and I disagree with that.
Playing with the Electoral College Calculator I believe there is a chance it ties equal to the chance Trump wins and equal to the chance Harris wins. There are 4 very strong scenarios that it ties and a few weaker ones as well.
The strongest is Trump wins/loses everything he did in 2020 EXCEPT he flips Pennsylvania (very possible) and Georgia (quite probable) and loses the 1 EC vote in Maine he won last time.
So we have to look at what the make up of the House will be in January 2025.
Discuss your thoughts on how you think things will go when the EC ties.
There’s not really any discussion to be had about this. Though the total number of Representatives for each party might change, the fact that the GOP has more Reps in more states than do the Democrats is so unlikely to change as to be, well, not worth discussing.
And it’s the number of state delegations (the Republicans now have and will have more) that determines the vote if there is a tie in the Electoral College.
Yes, I think this will almost certainly be the case. One Californian will be worth 1/60 of one Wyomingite. Although it is equally true that one Texan will be tiny fraction of one Rhode Islander. Insane system.
What are your thoughts as to the possibility of the EC tying? I believe it has an equal chance of tying as do both candidates have of winning. This is the first time in in over a century we have been this close to it actually happening.
It’s certainly not equally as likely as either candidate winning outright. Yes, there are plausible scenarios where it happens, but there are a much greater number of scenarios where it doesn’t.
Currently, 26 states have Republican-majority Congressional delegations, 22 states have Democratic-majority Congressional delegations, and two are tied. One of the tied states (NC) is certain to move into the R column due to a gerrymander. Democrats have thin majorities at risk in Michigan and Pennysylvania and could lose their seat in single-member Alaska. The only state where Democrats have a decent chance to flip the majority is Arizona.
This is true even if Democrats pick up a substantial number of seats in the House. Because their pickup opportunities are largely in states where they’re already in the majority or they won’t win enough seats to flip the state – California, New York, Alabama, Louisianna.
There is also a decent chance that 1 Republican delegation would defect to join the Ds. If so, that would create a 25-25 tie in the House, and then Mike Johnson would become president.
Nope. Or at least probably not. If the House can’t choose a President, the VP becomes President until that happens. If there’s a contingent election for Pres, there’ll very likely be one for VP too. In that case, the Senate choses the new VP† and that is by a straight vote, not a vote by state delegation. So whichever party wins the Senate gets to elect the Vice President and possibly the Acting President.
Only if there’s also a failure to elect a VP does the Speaker of the House get to be Acting President. And it’s not certain unlikely Johnson will be the Speaker in the next Congress.
†Having two different contingent elections means there could be a split Administration with the President and VP of different parties. That hasn’t happened since the early days of the country when the VP was the runner up in the Electoral College vote.
That’s my understanding, too. (Supposedly there are GOP plans to try to get enough states’ electors disqualified to create an Electoral College tie, via a Supreme Court decision if necessary. These plans seem unlikely to succeed.)
One thing to note is that there is no VP tiebreaker in a contingent election in the Senate – the 12th Amendment requires “a majority of the whole number” of Senators (i.e. 51) to elect the Vice President.
Precedents are understandably scarce. But the relevant text of the 12th Amendment is that, "a quorum for the purpose shall consist of two-thirds of the whole number of Senators, and a majority of the whole number shall be necessary to a choice. " I would assume that a vacancy would reduce the “whole number of Senators.”
Actually, we came very close to it in 2004, though nobody seemed to notice at the time.
Bush won the electoral vote, 286-251 (a MN elector voted for Edwards). But he won Iowa (7 EVs) by 10,059 votes, New Mexico (5 EVs) by 5988 votes, and Nevada (5 EVs) by 21,500 votes. An additional 37,550 votes for Kerry, properly apportioned, in these three states, would have changed that count to 269-268, and an EC plurality isn’t good enough, so it would have gone to the House.
Where Bush would have won easily, so it wouldn’t have mattered, and that’s probably why nobody paid it much mind.
Yeah, they’ve been doing that forever and decided changing now would cause confusion. I don’t see how. They probably just don’t want to do the work to change it.
