Pirates
Yankees
Hits are like the popular vote. Runs are like the Electoral College.
In baseball, a team can rack up more hits than its opponent and still lose the game — hits only count if they turn into runs at the right moment. A presidential candidate can win more total votes nationwide and still lose the presidency — votes only count if they win states. Both things have really happened. Here's the mechanism, verified both ways.
The baseball version — Game 7, 1960 World Series
Hits
11
13
Runs — decides the game
10 — won
9 — lost
The election version — 4 times the popular vote winner lost
Every instance, in full
| Year | Won the popular vote | Won the presidency | Popular vote margin |
|---|
Both sides of this page are decided by the same kind of mismatch. A base hit only produces a run if it's followed by more hits, or comes with runners already on base — an inning full of singles with nobody on can end scoreless. A popular vote only produces an electoral vote if it helps win a state — a landslide in a state you were always going to win, or always going to lose, adds to the national total without moving a single electoral vote.
1876 is the only case where the popular-vote winner had an outright majority (over 50%), not just a plurality — Samuel Tilden remains the only candidate in American history to lose the presidency after winning a majority of the popular vote. A fifth election, 1824, is often mentioned alongside these: Andrew Jackson won both the popular vote and the most electoral votes, but fell short of a majority, and the House of Representatives chose John Quincy Adams instead — a different mechanism than the other four, so it's kept separate here.
Same underlying shape as our 1960 World Series page and the gerrymandering grid: whenever a contest is decided by winning discrete units — innings, states, districts — rather than by adding up every point scored, the total and the winner can point in different directions.
1960 World Series Game 7 box score: Baseball Almanac. Election results: National Archives Electoral College records and the American Presidency Project (UCSB). Popular vote percentages are of the national total vote, not of the two-candidate total.