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My friends Michael Maibach and Tara Ross have both used the World Series to illustrate how the Electoral College works (an analogy earlier used by MIT physicist Alan Natapoff, another Electoral College defender), explaining that the championship doesn’t go to the team that scores the most runs over seven games but instead goes to the team that wins four out of seven (or fewer). And it’s happened several times that the team scoring fewer runs across several games has managed to win the World Series (including the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1960, Minnesota Twins in 1991, Florida Marlins in 1997, and Anaheim Angels in 2002). 

Few people would argue that these champions were the “wrong winner”—these teams focused on winning four games, not scoring the most runs during all the World Series games. If that had been the goal, they would have played each game differently (for example, the Pirates might have changed pitchers more quickly in the 6th inning of game 2 when the Yankees scored 7 runs). Likewise, it doesn’t make sense to consider anybody who wins the most electoral votes to be the “wrong winner” because they received fewer popular votes—if the popular vote was what decided the election, each candidate would have focused on rounding up as many votes in places where they were strongest, and it’s impossible to know how that election turns out. 

It occurred to me as I was watching my eldest son’s game the other night that baseball has another lesson to teach us about the Electoral College, one that debunks a key talking point of advocates for the National Popular Vote interstate compact (NPV). 

The claim by NPV’s backers is that if a state isn’t a “swing state” it’s irrelevant and doesn’t have a meaningful role in the presidential election process. The organization behind NPV calls non-swing states “politically irrelevant spectator states” because they typically are not inundated with candidate visits and campaign advertising during the last two months of the campaign (they ignore all the visits and advertising that often takes place in these states during nomination fights and for fundraising).

But are non-swing states really “irrelevant,” as claimed? A short recap of my son’s recent baseball game explains why that’s not an accurate or fair description.

My son’s team entered the bottom of the 7th and final inning down by two runs, 6-8. Two of his teammates scored and two others either struck out or were thrown out. My son then got on first on a walk, stole second and third, and the next two batters walked to load the bases. The next batter – the final batter, it turned out – was then walked as well, which brought my son home for the go-ahead score and ended the game.

So, was that final run scored by my son the only run that mattered? Were the other eight runs, and the players that scored them, “irrelevant” because they weren’t the runs that clinched victory?

Of course not. Every single run counted—take a couple of them away and my son’s team loses instead of winning. It would be an insult to the other players on his team to argue that only his final run mattered and that the rest of the players were just “spectators” to the game that he won.

The same goes for the Electoral College and the role played by “swing states” and “safe states.” Try winning the White House as a Democrat without California or as a Republican without Texas. Those states, and every other state, matter and are enormously important in presidential elections. Just because the outcome in some states can be predicted before the campaign gets into full swing, while in others it isn’t known until a few days after the election, does not make them irrelevant. It would be impossible to win the Electoral College if a candidate just won the “swing” states while not having any “safe state” wins in their column as well.

There are books and essays on the valuable lessons that baseball can teach, and of course, there’s also the wit of Yogi Berra. Turns out baseball can also teach a few lessons about the Electoral College and National Popular Vote, including that just like every run counts, so does every state.