# How much could Joe Biden win the popular vote by and still lose the Electoral College?

As of Tuesday morning, Former Vice President Joe Biden was running ahead of President Donald Trump in most national polls, and in crucial swing-state polls including in Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota and Pennsylvania. Biden is the favorite to win the popular vote based on a 6.5-percentage-point lead in the average of polls taken in the weeks leading up to Election Day and aggregated by RealClearPolitics.

The next president, however, need not be the winner of the popular vote but the man who secures 270 or more votes in the Electoral College — that is, a majority of the 538 electoral votes that are up for grabs among the 50 states, apportioned by population.

Trump could have an Electoral College advantage, as he did in 2016 when Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by 2.1 percentage points, and nearly 3 million votes, but lost the presidency.

So just how much could Biden win the popular vote by and yet lose the Electoral College? 

According to FiveThirtyEight, if Biden were to win the popular vote by over 6 points, he would have a greater than 99% chance to win the Electoral College. A 5- or 6-point popular-vote advantage for Biden would amount to a roughly 97% chance of winning the Electoral College.

Such a scenario, then, gives Trump a 3% chance of winning the presidency, which isn’t likely from a probability standpoint, even as that outcome remains entirely possible.

Other 2020 presidential election forecasters have given similar odds. Much-heralded CNN political analyst Harry Enten claims that “Trump probably can’t win in the Electoral College if he loses by more than 4 to 5 points nationally.”

Despite the polling and despite the 2016 returns, and even the so-called blue-wave midterm results of 2018, a Trump popular-vote victory is not an impossibility. Trump has a 3% chance of winning the popular vote, according to FiveThirtyEight. 

David A. Walker, a professor at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business whose presidential election model predicted the popular vote in 2016 within 0.5%, said the popular-vote margin for Biden would have to reach landslide levels to fully eliminate Trump’s Electoral College advantage.

“If we were seeing 60%, and we are not, but if we were seeing 60%, I could not imagine how Wisconsin and Pennsylvania wouldn’t be in the Biden column,” Walker told MarketWatch. Those states have been tagged as keys to one of the combinations that Trump would need to secure to reach 270 electoral votes.

The last presidential election in which a candidate got at least 60% of the vote came in 1972, when Republican incumbent Richard Nixon got 60.7% of the vote to defeat Democratic challenger George McGovern.

A split result between the Electoral College and the popular vote in favor of Republicans would mean that Democrats would have won the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections yet secured control of the White House in only four of those elections.

It’s worth noting, however, that a structural advantage in the Electoral College is not something that only Republicans have benefited from. Barack Obama had an Electoral College advantage in his 2012 win over Republican challenger Mitt Romney, according to FiveThirtyEight.

Follow all of MarketWatch’s 2020 presidential election coverage.