BIDEN WON'T REALLY BE TIED WITH TRUMP UNTIL HE'S LEADING BY 5, BECAUSE THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE SUCKS

The 2024 presidential election now looks like a tie. According to the Real Clear Polling average, Donald Trump's lead had been cut to 0.2% in a two-candidate race. And today Joe Biden gets good news from the polling unit of The New York Times:

President Biden has nearly erased Donald J. Trump’s early polling advantage, amid signs that the Democratic base has begun to coalesce behind the president despite lingering doubts about the direction of the country, the economy and his age, according to a new survey by The New York Times and Siena College.

Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump are now virtually tied, with Mr. Trump holding a 46 percent to 45 percent edge. That is an improvement for Mr. Biden from late February, when Mr. Trump had a sturdier 48 percent to 43 percent lead just before he became the presumptive Republican nominee.

Oliver Willis has a point:

Maybe Trump will continue to sink his own candidacy. Maybe the Biden campaign's attacks on Trump, particularly on reproductive rights, are working and will continue to work.

But even though the race is effectively tied, it isn't really tied. Trump is still winning. I'll regard the race as tied only when Biden has a persistent 5-point lead. The reason is simple: the Electoral College.

We know that Biden won the popular vote in the 2020 election by 7 million votes -- 7,059,526, to be precise. (All 2020 election data comes from Wikipedia's 2020 election page.) But that entire victory margin was in just two states: Biden won California by a margin of 5,104,121 votes and New York by a margin of 1,992,889 votes. That's a total of 7,097,010 votes.

To put it another way, Biden won California by 29.16% and New York by 23.13%. But those huge margins were wasted. Biden would have won California's 55 electoral votes and New York's 29 electoral votes even if he'd won the states by much smaller margins.

In fact, Biden won five states by margins of more than a million votes: California, New York, Illinois (20 electoral votes, 16.99% victory margin), Massachusetts (11 electoral votes, 33.46% victory margin), and Maryland (10 electoral votes, 33.21% victory margin). By contrast, Donald Trump didn't win any states by more than a million votes. The most populous, electoral-vote-rich states he won were Texas (38 electoral votes, 5.58% victory margin), Florida (29 electoral votes, 3.36% victory margin), and Ohio (18 electral votes, 8.03% victory margin).

What this means, for the purposes of the Electoral College, is that Trump's votes were distributed much more efficiently than Biden's. Trump could add these three large states to the many smaller states in the middle of the country, the South, and the Mountain West and nearly win the Electoral College despite losing the popular vote by four and a half points. (Trump would have needed a little over 40,000 votes in Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin to score a 269-269 tie in the Electoral College, which would have been resolved in Trump's favor in the House of Representatives, because each state's delegation would have cast one vote, and 26 state delegations were majority Republican.)

If Biden is tied in the polls, that means he's approximately 4 or 5 points weaker nationwide than he was in 2020, at least for now. It suggests that he'll struggle to win the swing states that gave him his Electoral College victory in 2020. Swing-state polling suggests he's struggling in states such as Arizona and Georgia. If Biden could beat Trump in one of Trump's Big Three states, it could decide the election, but polling in Texas, Florida, and Ohio suggests that they are, if anything, somewhat more Republican now than they were four years ago -- not as Republican as California, New York, Illinois, Massachusetts, and Maryland are Democratic, but Republican enough to suggest that they're safe Trump states.

I don't think Donald Trump's Electoral College win in 2016 was a black swan event. I think 2020 suggests that Republicans can routinely win the Electoral College while losing the popular vote, if they lose it by 4 points or less. In 2020, Biden needed to be four and a half points stronger than Trump to eke out an Electoral College win in the swing states. I think the same will be true this year and in years to come, unless Democrats can finally find a way to flip Texas, or can regain the ability to win Florida or Ohio.

So, yes, Biden needs a significant popular-vote lead in order to be tied in the polls. Maybe he'll get there. But he's not there yet.