What would the Electoral College look like if it was based on FBS bowl wins instead of population? I’m glad you asked. My answer will proceed in four parts: background on the Electoral College, background on FBS bowl games, methodology, and results.
1. Electoral College and Apportionment
“The Electoral College is a process, not a place.” What Is The Electoral College?, National Archives (2019-12-23). Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution provides that the President and Vice President of the United States are elected by a vote of the electors appointed by each state. (The Twenty-Third Amendment says that for purposes of electing a president, the District of Columbia is considered a state.) Each state’s legislature may direct the manner in which it appoints those electors. With such discretion, each state’s legislature in theory could choose to appoint electors however it pleased. Currently, each state dictates that its electors every presidential election will be chosen in accordance with votes by its citizens, which leads to a lot of misunderstandings about the role the general population has in electing the president. 48 states award their electoral votes in a winner-take-all fashion to the winner of the state’s popular vote, while Nebraska and Maine award one electoral vote to the winner of each congressional district and the remaining 2 votes to the statewide winner.
All this legal background doesn’t address one important question though: how many electors does each state get? Article II, Section 1 says that a state’s number of electors is “equal to the whole Number of Senators and representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress.” (The Twenty-Third Amendment says that the District of Columbia gets 3). Each state’s number of senators is easy enough: it’s always 2. See Art. I, § 3. But how many representatives does each state get? That’s determined by an “apportion[ment] among the several States . . . according to their respective Numbers,” i.e. their total population. Art. I, § 2. And this enumeration of the total number of people within each state takes place every 10 years in what we know today as the decennial Census.
The aforementioned “apportionment” requires both a total number of representatives and a method for allocating those representatives. Yet both those elements have changed over time. See Historical Perspective, United States Census Bureau (2020-03-30). In 1911, Congress set the number of representatives at 433, with one additional seat for each new state admitted to the union. See 37 Stat. 13, 14. With the addition of Alaska and Hawaii, that brings us to today’s 435 representatives. (The Constitution places an upper bound on the total number of representatives: 1 representative / 30,000 people. Art. I, § 2, cl. 3. With ~330 million people in the United States, that’s an upper limit of ~11,000 representatives).
The apportionment method has changed over time because it’s a tricky problem. “It is impossible to attain absolute mathematical equality in terms of the number of persons per representative, or in the share each person has in a representative, when seats are to be apportioned among states of varying population size and when there must be a whole number of representatives per state.” Historical Perspective. The current methodology mandated by Congress, 2 U.S.C. § 2a(a), is the “method of equal proportions” or what Wikipedia calls the Huntington-Hill method. For the algorithmic and technical details, the Census has you covered. How Apportionment is Calculated, United States Census Bureau (2021-04-26).
2. FBS College Football and Bowl Games
I already gave a primer on college football, so I will only repeat here what is necessary to follow along. While there are countless colleges in every state that field a football team, the best programs compete at the NCAA Division I level. What make college football special when compared to other sports is that Division I is further divided in to FBS (Football Bowl Subdivision) and FCS (Football Championship Subdivision). FBS teams are generally better than FCS teams; FBS and FCS used to be named Division I-A and I-AA, respectively. There are 130 FBS teams, and not every state has an FBS team. While FCS teams (e.g., Harvard and North Dakota State) compete in an NCAA tournament to determine an NCAA-sanctioned national champion, FBS teams (e.g., Stanford and Alabama) participate in a menagerie of post-season bowl games to determine a mythical national champion.
Not every FBS team is eligible to play in a bowl game at the end of the season. Currently, only teams who finished with at least 6 wins that season are eligible to play in a bowl game. And eligibility does not mean you are guaranteed to play in a bowl game. Bowl games—of which there are about 40 now—are organized by a bunch of middle men who pay to host a game in hopes of raking in ticket and TV money. The premiere bowl games have contracts with power conferences to take the best teams in hopes of drawing the most eyeballs, and bowls lower down in the informal pecking order take what they can get from the rest.
Generally, bowl games pit two teams that are roughly as good as each other (unless a different match-up would make a bowl more money). The result is that just looking at bowl wins is a terrible way to compare different teams within a season or programs over time. For example, in 2018 the #3 Notre Dame Fighting Irish got mauled by the #2 Clemson Tigers in the Cotton Bowl while the unranked Stanford Cardinal beat the unranked Pittsburgh Panthers in the Sun Bowl. But no one would seriously suggest that Notre Dame was worse than Stanford that season, especially given that Notre Dame trounced Stanford earlier in the season. If you look at the typical metrics that measure success of a football program, “Bowl Winning %” is the one category that looks nothing like the others. See Unweighted Average Ranking, Winsipedia.
3. Methodology
So what would the Electoral College look like if apportionment wasn’t based on state population, but was based on a state’s FBS bowl wins? To find out, I looked at bowl games—including the College Football Playoff National Championship Game—for the 2011 season through the 2020 season. I created a spreadsheet with the winner of each bowl game and the winner’s home state. I then simply summed the number of wins for each state in that 10-year span. I did not discount vacated bowl wins—if the team celebrated on the field, then it counts as win notwithstanding whatever violations caused the NCAA to try to strike it from the record books. I also did not give any extra to weight to Bowl Championship Series or College Football Playoff games. The 2017 Rose Bowl counts just the same as the 2013 AdvoCare V100 Bowl.
With these win totals, I implemented the Method of Equal Proportions using Python’s voting package to get the number of seats. (Because some states had no bowl wins and the method doesn’t work with “0” as the numerator, I had to give the winless states a positive value. And because the package only works for integer numbers, I multiplied the real number of wins by 100 and then gave the winless states one win).
With the number of seats, I had enough to make some tables and give you the numbers comparing the results to the actual census apportionment. But I obviously wanted maps. So I used Tilegrams by Pitch Interactive to create a cartogram with the number of state tiles representing the number of electoral college votes. I exported this to a .svg and used Inkscape to recolor the states. I used GIMP to add state labels but did not have the patience to add legends or titles (PD, please forgive me). I also used GIMP to make the terrible cover image of Gerald Ford overlayed on one of the maps. Ford played college football at Michigan. Because Ford was appointed to the position of Vice President (instead of elected by the electoral college) and succeeded Nixon as President when Nixon resigned, he is the only person to have become President without being elected to some position by the electoral college.
4. Implications and Results
Before getting to the results, let’s take a moment to think about how absolutely nuts and entertaining this would be. With nearly 40 bowl games a year, that’s roughly 400 bowl games over a decade. With 435 seats up for grabs, this means that approximately 1 electoral seat is at stake in every bowl game. This also opens the door for “cracking” and “packing” a la gerrymandering, whether intentional or unintentional. Maybe UCF and Florida are both great teams in the same season. If they end up playing each other in a bowl game, then the state of Florida is guaranteed one win and one seat. But if they play in separate bowl games, Florida picks up 0 or 2 seats depending on the results of the games. Finally, imagine the absolute firestorm over vacated bowl wins.
The results of the 2020 Census and the apportionment were recently announced. Let’s take a look at that Electoral College map first:
California, Texas, Florida, and New York stand out pretty easily. The Northeast Corridor appears bloated compared to its geographic footprint, while the non-coastal West is crunched.
Now, let’s take a look at the apportionment by College Football:
In table form:
| State | Bowl Wins 2011–20 | Votes with Bowls | Votes with 2020 Census | Bowl Diff |
| AL | 18 | 23 | 9 | 14 |
| AK | 0 | 3 | 3 | 0 |
| AZ | 6 | 9 | 11 | -2 |
| AR | 7 | 10 | 6 | 4 |
| CA | 20 | 25 | 54 | -29 |
| CO | 4 | 7 | 10 | -3 |
| CT | 0 | 3 | 7 | -4 |
| DE | 0 | 3 | 3 | 0 |
| FL | 20 | 25 | 30 | -5 |
| GA | 15 | 19 | 16 | 3 |
| HI | 3 | 5 | 4 | 1 |
| ID | 6 | 9 | 4 | 5 |
| IL | 7 | 10 | 19 | -9 |
| IN | 8 | 11 | 11 | 0 |
| IA | 5 | 8 | 6 | 2 |
| KS | 2 | 4 | 6 | -2 |
| KY | 10 | 13 | 8 | 5 |
| LA | 20 | 25 | 8 | 17 |
| ME | 0 | 3 | 4 | -1 |
| MD | 5 | 8 | 10 | -2 |
| MA | 1 | 3 | 11 | -8 |
| MI | 10 | 14 | 15 | -1 |
| MN | 4 | 7 | 10 | -3 |
| MS | 12 | 16 | 6 | 10 |
| MO | 3 | 5 | 10 | -5 |
| MT | 0 | 3 | 4 | -1 |
| NE | 3 | 5 | 5 | 0 |
| NV | 3 | 5 | 6 | -1 |
| NH | 0 | 3 | 4 | -1 |
| NJ | 2 | 4 | 14 | -10 |
| NM | 2 | 4 | 5 | -1 |
| NY | 8 | 11 | 28 | -17 |
| NC | 19 | 24 | 16 | 8 |
| ND | 0 | 3 | 3 | 0 |
| OH | 21 | 26 | 17 | 9 |
| OK | 13 | 17 | 7 | 10 |
| OR | 7 | 10 | 8 | 2 |
| PA | 7 | 10 | 19 | -9 |
| RI | 0 | 3 | 4 | -1 |
| SC | 14 | 18 | 9 | 9 |
| SD | 0 | 3 | 3 | 0 |
| TN | 9 | 12 | 11 | 1 |
| TX | 33 | 40 | 40 | 0 |
| UT | 14 | 18 | 6 | 12 |
| VT | 0 | 3 | 3 | 0 |
| VA | 8 | 11 | 13 | -2 |
| WA | 5 | 8 | 12 | -4 |
| WV | 9 | 12 | 4 | 8 |
| WI | 7 | 10 | 10 | 0 |
| WY | 2 | 4 | 3 | 1 |
The biggest loser is California (-29). Blue-blood West Coast power USC took a major downturn in the 2010s, but even if the Californian Pac-12 and Mountain West teams were mediocre instead of bad, it would be a tall ask to get 54 votes. New York (-17) is next worst off, with its 3 FBS teams—Buffalo, Syracuse, and Army—not even close to the equivalent weight of New York City. New Jersey (-10), Pennsylvania (-9), and Massachusetts (-8) follow. Pennsylvania’s 2010s suffered from its flagship program—Penn State—dealing with scholarship restrictions and generally bad press because of that whole Jerry Sandusky thing that really hamstrung its seasons early in the decade. So PA would likely pick up seats in the next decade, whereas NJ and MA are basically hopeless.
There are 3 big winners in the Deep South, with Louisiana (+17), Alabama (+14), and Mississippi (+10). Louisiana benefited not only from LSU’s rise and CFP National Championship, but the Louisiana Ragin’ Cajuns’ four consecutive trips to the New Orleans bowl (in Louisiana, obviously) that I didn’t penalize for being vacated. The Crimson Tide’s twice-a-season bowl wins in the playoff era helped Alabama pull away. Mississippi benefitted greatly from the rampant NCAA violations at both Ole Miss and Mississippi State. Oklahoma (+10) and South Carolina (+9) picked up seats for obvious reasons: Oklahoma and Clemson have kicked ass this decade. Ohio (+9) and Utah (+12) also saw gains, but those states would need to credit their non-flagship programs too: Cincinnati, Ohio, Utah State, and BYU racked up bowl wins in early December games.
So what exactly would this mean for presidential elections? We can get an imperfect sense by looking at what would happen by applying the votes from the 2020 Election to the new map. I emphasize this is imperfect because an election conducted under a different map, with different ways to reach 270 votes, would be run differently. (This is partly why I find many discussions about “winning the popular vote” to be completely inane, but I digress.)
In the 2020 election, which was conducted under the apportionment from the 2010 Census, Biden (coded blue) beat Trump (coded red) with 306 electoral votes to 232. If this election were run under the 2020 apportionment ex post facto, Biden would have won 303 votes to 235.
Given the biggest winners and losers, I bet you can guess what the new bowl apportionment map looks like:
Trump beats Biden, 337-201.
This was Just My Blog.