The Geography of U.S. Presidential Elections

The U.S. Electoral College and Spatial Biases in Voter Power

“…Four times in American political history the Electoral College has allowed losers of the popular vote to win the presidency. In 1824, John Quincy Adams, with 30.9 percent of the vote, defeated Andrew Jackson, who drew 41.3 percent; in 1876, Rutherford Hayes, with 47.9 percent, defeated Samuel Tilden, who drew 50.9 percent; and in 1888, incumbent Democratic president Grover Cleveland, who polled 48.6 percent, was defeated by Benjamin Harrison, who received only 47.8 percent (Best 1996;Archer and Shelley 1988). Of course, most recently, in 2000 George W. Bush received 50.46 million popular votes (47.9 percent) compared to 51 million cast (48.4 percent) for Al Gore, but nonetheless won the Electoral College vote in a hotly disputed legal contest that was ultimately resolved by the Supreme Court.…”

“…Electoral geography, with a long and distinguished history (e.g., Prescott 1959), comprised the core of political geography in the 1980s but currently finds itself awkwardly poised between a tradition of uncritical, atheoretical empiricism on the one hand and a resurgent, theoretically self-conscious renaissance on the other. Classic works in this genre typically described how spatial variations in elections reflect electoral apportionments, economic and demographic factors, and the campaign strategies of parties and candidates (Taylor 1973;Taylor and Johnston 1979;Swauger 1980;Johnston 1982Johnston , 2002Archer, Murauskas, and Shelley 1985;Archer andShelley 1986, 1988;Archer 1988;Johnston, Shelley, and Taylor 1990). A related approach reflects the discipline's abiding concern with the state, social relations, and the sociospatial context of ideology, in which elections are seen as the exercise of subjectivity within structural constraints ranging from the local scale to the world system (Agnew 1996;Flint 2001;Johnston and Pattie 2003).…”