How Harris could secure a historic winning record for Democrats in November – and still lose

If Kamala Harris wins the popular vote in November, Democrats will do something no party has done since the formation of the modern party system nearly two centuries ago.

But that might not benefit them very much when it comes to governing.

If the vice president captures more votes than former President Donald Trump, it would be the eighth time in the past nine presidential elections that Democrats have won the national popular vote. That would establish a new record. Since the modern party system began in 1828, no party has won the popular vote over a nine presidential election sequence more than seven times. That has been accomplished twice: once by Republicans around the turn of the 20th century in a period defined most vividly by President Theodore Roosevelt, and then by Democrats in the decades after President Franklin D. Roosevelt realigned American politics with his “New Deal” coalition during the Depression.

Both the TR Republicans and the FDR Democrats indisputably dominated their eras, also maintaining control of Congress for years and lastingly setting the direction of national policy. By contrast, the modern day Democrats’ historic success at winning the popular vote hasn’t translated into nearly as much governing power for them.

Over this record run of popular vote success, Democrats have already twice lost the Electoral College – and thus the White House – while winning more votes. They have achieved unified control of the presidency and Congress much more rarely than the TR Republicans or FDR Democrats. Those differences have spawned a third crucial divergence: compared to their two predecessors in popular vote dominance, today’s Democrats have been able to name far fewer justices to the Supreme Court.

“It may be the most striking fact about recent American politics: that there is this long run of electoral triumph, at least in the popular vote, that doesn’t seem to map onto actual governing power in the way that we might expect to see,” said Paul Pierson, a political scientist at the University of California at Berkeley and co-author of the recent book “Partisan Nation,” on how hardening partisan polarization has changed American government and elections.

Harris isn’t guaranteed to capture the popular vote; Trump is running closer to her in most national polls than he did against Joe Biden at this point in 2020. And the seven key swing states are all so close that strategists in both parties see a real chance for Trump to win the Electoral College even if he loses the popular vote again, as he did in 2016. Even if Harris wins the White House, Democrats face very difficult odds of holding the Senate, where they are now clinging to a 51-49 majority.

A Republican Senate (and maybe House) majority coupled with a Harris victory would make her the first Democratic president since Grover Cleveland won in 1884 to enter office without unified control of both congressional chambers, pointed out Kyle Kondik, managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball election newsletter published by the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics. That would severely limit the agenda a President Harris could pursue – potentially illuminating again how much more difficult it has been for the modern Democrats than their predecessors to translate popular vote success into the power to pass the agenda their coalition has repeatedly voted to support.

Already, the disparity is glaring. The TR-era Republicans also held majorities in the House and Senate for 24 of the 28 years during which they controlled the White House. From FDR through LBJ, Democrats simultaneously controlled both chambers of Congress for 26 of the 28 years during which they held the White House. Those long periods of unified government control – each coalition at one point held the White House and Congress for 14 consecutive years – allowed the dominant party to systematically advance its agenda and fundamentally shape the nation’s direction for a generation.

The contrast in the Democrats’ modern experience is stunning. Not only have they lost the White House twice while winning the popular vote in this period, but they have controlled both chambers of Congress for just six of the 20 years in which they have held the White House since 1992. (Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Biden each held unified control of Congress for just the first two years of their presidencies before losing it in the first mid-term election.) Amazingly, Republicans won unified control of government in two elections when Democrats won a plurality of the national presidential vote: 2000 and 2016. The only previous time that happened was in 1888.

“Republicans have a path to getting a majority of seats without a majority of votes,” said Lee Drutman, a senior fellow in the political reform program at the centrist New America thinktank. “It is conceivable in this election that Republicans could lose the Senate vote, lose the presidential popular vote, lose the House popular majority vote, and still win control of all three chambers.”

With their control of Congress much more fleeting, Democrats have been unable to implement nearly as much of their agenda as the earlier dominant coalitions did. The disparity is especially vivid on another key lever of government power: appointments to the Supreme Court. By the end of the era of Republican popular vote supremacy in 1932, GOP presidents had appointed seven of the nine members of the Supreme Court. When the FDR Democrats’ long run of popular vote dominance ended in 1968, Democratic presidents had appointed five of the high court’s nine members. And even that number understates the extent of Democratic influence during this period, because the court in 1968 included four justices appointed by Dwight Eisenhower; when Eisenhower entered office in 1953, FDR and Truman had appointed all nine Supreme Court members.

Today, Democratic presidents have appointed only three of the Supreme Court’s nine members. “I think the framers would have a hard time getting their head around the idea that one political party had won the popular vote for the presidency in 7 of 8, or 8 of 9 elections, and the other party had 6 of the 9 seats on the Supreme Court,” said Pierson.

A Harris popular vote victory in November would match another milestone: It would mark the fifth consecutive election in which Democrats have won the popular vote, a feat previously achieved in the modern party era only by the Democrats behind Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman from 1932 through 1948.

Today’s Democrats have already set another record by winning the popular vote in seven of the past eight presidential elections; the previous high over an eight-election sequence was six, for Democrats from 1828 through 1856. But this year’s result will be particularly important for historic comparisons because no party has ever maintained a consistent edge in the presidential popular vote for more than nine elections before another party started a run of its own.

While the consistency of the Democratic popular vote advantage is unmatched, in other ways the party’s edge looks more modest than its predecessors. That’s one reason it has translated into less governing power.

The Democrats’ popular vote winning stretch began in 1992 with Clinton’s victory over George H.W. Bush. Clinton again in 1996, Al Gore in 2000, Obama in 2008 and 2012, Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Biden in 2020 all then won the presidential popular vote. The only time since 1992 that Republicans won the popular vote was when George W. Bush attracted 50.7% in 2004.

But in their seven popular vote victories since 1992, Democrats have crossed 50% of the vote just three times – in both of Obama’s victories and Biden’s win in 2020. The highest share of the popular vote Democrats have won over this period is the 52.9% that Obama garnered in 2008.

Republicans assembled bigger majorities in their period of greatest dominance around the turn of the 20th century. The GOP’s seven-of-nine popular vote run began when William McKinley won the presidency in 1896 and 1900, continued with Teddy Roosevelt’s resounding 1904 win and William Howard Taft’s win in 1908, and extended through the post World War I victories by Warren Harding (in 1920), Calvin Coolidge (1924) and Herbert Hoover (1928).

Over these nine elections, the Republican presidential candidates exceeded 50% of the popular vote seven times, reached 58% twice, and peaked at 60.3% with Harding in 1920.

The FDR-era Democrats were nearly as successful. In their seven popular vote victories over the nine elections from 1932-1968, Democrats reached 50% of the vote five times and exceeded 60% twice, peaking with Lyndon B. Johnson’s 61.1% landslide in 1964.

The earlier majority coalitions also displayed more breadth of support in the Electoral College. In their seven popular vote victories, the TR-era Republicans won 71% of the available Electoral College votes; the FDR-era Democrats, in their seven popular vote victories, won 80% of the total Electoral College votes. In their seven popular vote victories since 1992, Democrats have won about 58% of the available Electoral College votes.

Most importantly, Democrats over this period twice have won the popular vote and lost the Electoral College and the presidency – to Bush in 2000 and to Trump in 2016. Neither the TR-era Republicans nor the FDR-era Democrats lost the Electoral College in any presidential election when they won the popular vote; indeed, until 2000, such a divergence had happened only three times in over 200 years of American presidential elections. Now there is a real chance the presidential and Electoral College vote may diverge for the third time in the past 24 years.

The lower ceiling for Democrats in both the popular and Electoral College votes largely reflects what political scientists John Sides, Lynn Vavreck and Michael Tesler have called the “calcification” of American politics. In the earlier eras, elections more regularly featured big swings in allegiance and the ascendant party could sweep up a wide swathe of persuadable voters.

Compared to the earlier periods, far more voters today are locked down, seemingly permanently. The result is that far more states have voted the same way in every election during this era of Democratic popular vote dominance than in the earlier periods.

In the eight presidential elections since 1992, 15 states – all part of what I dubbed “the blue wall” – have now voted for the Democratic presidential nominee every time. Another 13 states have voted against the Democrats in each of those elections; all 28 of those states are strongly favored to side with the same party again next month.

This dwarfs the level of consistency in the earlier periods. Just seven states voted the same way in all nine elections during the Republican party’s era of early 20th century dominance: Vermont for the GOP and six states from the old confederacy – at a time when most Southerners still “voted the way their daddy shot”– against it. (Three more states defected from the GOP nominee only in 1912 to support Roosevelt when he ran as a third-party candidate.)

Democrats won only two former confederate states (Arkansas and North Carolina) in each election from 1932-1968 and no state voted against them in all nine of those campaigns. Through the 20th century, very close presidential elections may have been rare, Kondik noted, but “when we did have them, a lot of the states were up for grabs.” Today, with so many states cemented in their preferences, the opportunity for either side to win a resounding victory is greatly diminished.

Yet even with all these limits, Democrats have amassed a winning streak in the presidential popular vote that in the past has yielded much more lasting control over the federal government and the nation’s direction. And that points to the other key reason their popular vote dominance hasn’t translated into more consistent governing power: how Republicans are now benefiting from the kinks in the constitutional system that favor smaller states with less population density.

That small state bias shows up to some extent in the Electoral College since every state, no matter how big or small, receives a baseline of two electoral votes. But this tilt is felt most profoundly in the Senate where every state, regardless of population, receives the same two seats. As Republicans over the past few decades have grown more dominant in smaller states across the nation’s interior, that’s provided the GOP a huge advantage in the battle for Senate control.

Drutman has calculated that if you assign half of each state’s population to each senator, Senate Republicans have represented a majority of Americans only once since 1958 – and even then they had only 50.2% of the population as constituents in the 1997-1998 session. Yet since 1980, the GOP has held the Senate majority for slightly more than half the time; today, Democrats possess just a slim 51-49 seat majority even though they represent 58% of the nation’s population.

The structural GOP advantage in the Senate, combined with the party’s growing willingness under outgoing GOP leader Mitch McConnell to use the filibuster, has left Democrats facing “a lot more limits” than the earlier coalitions on what they “have been able to do despite those popular vote majorities,” Drutman said.

The House bias toward smaller places isn’t as serious as the Senate’s, but even there, Republicans have benefited because Democrats’ votes are overly concentrated in large metropolitan areas – a process intensified by aggressive gerrymandering in many red states. In contrast to presidential elections, Republicans have often won the total national popular vote in House elections since 1992, but the share of seats they have won in the chamber has repeatedly exceeded their share of the overall vote.

At various points during this long dry spell in the presidential popular vote, some voices in the GOP have raised alarms about the trend. That happened in the celebrated party “autopsy” report after Mitt Romney’s loss to Obama in 2012; Nikki Haley raised concerns again about the persistent popular vote shortfalls during her unsuccessful bid for the GOP nomination this year.

But these alarms have failed to find much traction in the party. Trump in 2016 turned the autopsy’s principal message on its head by focusing not on reaching out to non-White and moderate voters, but by centering his campaign on mobilizing more culturally conservative and economically populist blue-collar Whites. Even now, most Republicans appear unconcerned about the possibility (if not probability) that Trump could lose the popular vote for a third time, if his potential gains since 2020 among non-White voters are eclipsed by losses among well-educated, formerly GOP-leaning, suburbanites.

While repeatedly losing the popular vote is a problem “at least symbolically,” said Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini, “I think most in the party have acquiesced to the reality that Trump has a ceiling at something like 47% but is extremely well-optimized for the Electoral College, so the most likely win scenario (for him) is one without the popular vote.”

If anything, it is Democrats who have displayed more concern about the modern pattern of election results. Many party centrists have argued that despite the party’s unprecedented run of wins in the presidential popular vote, its struggles in the Electoral College and the Senate show that “the Democratic Party has to be able to be competitive in more places; it has to connect with more people in different places,” as Jim Kessler, executive vice president for policy at Third Way, a centrist Democratic group, put it.

That kind of self-criticism is much rarer in the Trump-era GOP. Pierson and Drutman both note that the GOP’s ability to repeatedly win both the White House and either congressional chamber despite reliably losing the presidential popular vote has short-circuited what is supposed to be one of the self-correcting mechanisms of the American political system.

Usually, Pierson pointed out, when a party repeatedly loses the popular vote, it shifts direction – as Democrats did in Clinton’s move to the center following the party’s three blow-out losses to Reagan and H.W. Bush in the 1980s. But the Trump-era Republicans haven’t had much incentive to rethink their direction because they “have not paid a big price in terms of their ability to exercise authority,” Pierson said. “If you are not paying a price for it, why not keep doing what you are doing or try to intensify the parts of the political system that allow minorities to prevail over majorities” such as gerrymandering or the filibuster?

Ruffini countered that even with another potential popular vote loss, it would not be fair to describe the GOP as the minority party if it wins the electoral vote and at least one chamber of Congress. “Everyone competes under the same rules,” he said, “and the system is optimized for narrow wins, which in the Electoral College and the Senate might mean non-majority wins.”

But if Trump loses both the popular and electoral vote at a time when so many Americans are dissatisfied with Biden’s performance and the nation’s direction, “then I think there will be a moment of reckoning,” said Ruffini, author of the recent book “Party of The People” about the GOP’s changing coalition. “That’ll be a serious problem, far more serious than when they wrote the autopsy in 2012, when we were going up against a generational political talent in Barack Obama. It would call into question the ability to do the most basic things at a national level.”

Conversely, if Trump again wins the electoral vote while failing in the popular vote, the losers would include not only Harris and Democrats but also the bedrock civics book assumption that in American democracy, majorities rule.