How much would an extra vote matter?
I’m a {democrat/republican} in {state that didn’t go my way} and I didn’t vote. How much would my vote have mattered?
Particularly outside of battleground states, the relative value of your vote in presidential elections may seem small. If you’re a Republican — or yet another Democrat — in California, what’s the point of voting? One way to consider how important an extra vote would have been — or inverse, how important a real vote was — is to calculate the voter cost per electoral college vote. That is, how many more voters would the losing party in a state need per college vote?
This graphic shows the vote share of additional voters for the losing party in each state, assuming enough turned out to flip the state. A wide bar denotes a more important vote, while narrower bars are long shots.
You can consider this graphic a proxy for how bad should I feel for not voting for a major party? For a left-leaning Michigander or a New Hampshire conservative, that answer is ‘a lot’; elsewhere, it’s easier to shrug your shoulders.
Amid the deluge of takes (some sensible, some not) about what led to the generally unexpected election outcome, the striking reminder of this graphic is just how unlucky the Democrats were. Where Republicans could be slightly irked by the narrow loss of 4 votes in NH, Democrats have to live with narrow losses and what-ifs for four big states with 75 college votes.
Of course, this deals in a theoretical extra vote. What about the value of a real, winning vote? Flip the chart. If the GOP needed 2737 votes to win the 4 electoral college votes from New Hampshire, that also means that 2737 Democrat voters actually getting to the voting booth won that state for Clinton.
Caveats
This is a simple measure.
The biggest caveat here is in the focus: looking only at presidential votes ignores that there are many other issues on a ballot. 4 million more Californians came out for Hilary than she needed, but their attendance was more impactful for other ballot initiatives and elections. For example, Proposition 66 — on speeding up the death penalty — passed 51–49.
This graphic also doesn’t reflect the winner-takes-all nature of all the states except Nebraska and Maine, and the logistics that come into play with it. Republicans were very close to winning New Hampshire’s 4 college votes, but in a hindsight redo, campaigning for those 4 college votes would be less valuable than Democrats campaigning more for Michigan’s 16 college votes. Population and voter turnout are also not factored here. Finding 10.7k extra votes in a Michigan would be nearly twice as easy as 2.7k more voters in New Hampshire.
Winner-takes-all means that value can be misleading. For an individual extra vote for a state loser, there is no value. Rather, the focus here is how valuable a push to win would have relative to the college vote reward.
Finally, I did not include Maine and Nebraska in the graphic above, because they would be misleading. Both states give out 2 electoral votes for the popular vote winner, then 1 for each congressional district. This splits the college vote share of each vote, making it less tidily quantifiable than the other numbers.
