9

From Wikipedia...

The proposed Wyoming Rule calls for expanding the House until the standard Representative-to-population ratio equals that of the smallest entitled unit (currently the state of Wyoming). This proposal is primarily designed to address the fact that some House districts are currently nearly twice the size of others; for instance, there are just over 1 million residents in Montana's single district, compared to about 570,000 in Wyoming's...

Since the number of representatives determines the number of electors, what effect would this have on the electoral college decisions being made in recent years?

Of course, the political strategies would have been different with the new landscape - but I was curious on a by-the-numbers analysis.

Improve this question

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
6

The Wikipedia link from the question includes a table showing the sizes since the 2010 census. These would be good for all elections from 2012 through 2020. The 2020 census would first affect the 2022 legislative election and the 2024 presidential election.

Anyway, if we apply the actual states won by Trump as per current projections, we get an electoral college result of 333 to 315 in his favor. That's closer but not by enough. Note that the link says that the Wyoming number is 546 but they allocate the states only 545 congressional districts. Moving to 546 total would give South Dakota one extra district, making it 334 to 315. The remaining 3 electoral votes come from the District of Columbia, which has fewer people than South Dakota and would therefore only have one congressional district.

The new 270 under that would be 325. That's true for both 545 and 546 congressional districts so long as the District of Columbia would only be allocated one.

Improve this answer
5
  • 3
    I ran through with Bush v. Gore - it would have been a tie. docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/…
    – Mark
    Nov 11, 2016 at 23:09
  • Electoral votes also factor in senators, though. So keep that in mind. You'd need to add 100 to the total of electoral votes.
    – user1530
    Nov 11, 2016 at 23:40
  • @blip I did -- note that the Wyoming number (number of districts under this Wyoming rule) is 546 but there are 649 electors.
    – Brythan
    Nov 12, 2016 at 2:06
  • @Brythan apologies you are correct. I think this whole puzzle is confusing me. :) The catch with your answer, though, is I don't think it's accounting for the winner-take-all system. If each electoral vote was given proportionally, I think this answer makes sense. But they aren't given proportionally. In fact, with more districts, I believe (not positive, though) that things would skew blue given the number of districts specifically in the large blue states of CA and NY and such.
    – user1530
    Nov 12, 2016 at 2:12
  • 2
    I awarded every elector winner-take-all by state except Maine, where I left it as was (Maine has the same number of electors). I didn't copy that into the problem because it would be a lot of formatting work, but I did do it. It does skew in Clinton's favor (margin down from 74 to 19), just not enough to change the final result.
    – Brythan
    Nov 12, 2016 at 2:23

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .