Trump and the Electoral College

This column by Nate Cohn is a clever dissection of the Trump victory in the Electoral College, with some cute historical "what-ifs." His point is that the most commonly cited biases of the Electoral College– such as the over-representation of small-population states– did not have much effect this election. What did matter is the elevated role of chance resulting from winner-take-all in battleground states. If the toss-up states are sufficiently large, luck can easily decide the outcome. In this case, Trump, ever the Casino man, won four of the five decisive coin tosses. That kind of thing happens more often than you might like.