On Saturday, Paul Goldman and Mark Rozell authored a piece in Politico titled “Illegal Immigrants Could Elect Hillary Clinton.” Usually, a headline like that accompanies a story about voter fraud or back-of-the-envelope math on how immigration reform might create a huge bloc of new Democratic Hispanic voters (maybeeven a “bonanza” forDemocrats).
But Goldman and Rozell took a more interesting angle. They assert that the Electoral College is biased against Republicans because illegal immigrants (who can’t vote but are counted in the U.S. Census, thus influencing how many electoral votes each state gets) live mostly in blue states, and that this fact “significantly reduces the chances of the GOP winning the presidency.”
Goldman and Rozell do the math on which states would gain and lose votes and find that if illegal immigrants and non-citizens were not counted towards electoral vote allocation, the GOP would likely gain four electoral votes and the Democrats could lose four. They then play out a plausible 2016 scenario in which the Republican candidate wins 266 electoral votes – falling exactly four votes short of the magic 270 needed to win the Oval Office.
The argument is interesting, but it’s ultimately quite speculative. Even if one accepts their demographic math, their assertion only works if the 2016 election is extremely close (which is far from a given), and even then there are good reasons to think that these four electoral votes won’t be the sole factor that makes the difference.