Bartlet wins a bunch of traditional Democratic strongholds on the West Coast and in the Northeast. (Ritchie, alas, never realized he was running against the protagonist of a TV show, which would have been helpful information for his campaign to have.) I don’t really know why Bartlet would be that popular but for the fact of Sorkin stacking the deck in his favor, but let’s go with it.Īt first blush, the map above is pretty darn odd. Now, in the 2002 election of the West Wing universe, President Bartlet won with an 11-point edge in the popular vote, which translated to 419 out of 538 electoral votes, with the other 119 taken by his Republican challenger Robert Ritchie. Here’s the one for the 2002 reelection of President Bartlet, courtesy of the West Wing fan wiki: How did Bartlet win the Dakotas? We see two presidential elections during the series’ run - Bartlet’s reelection in 2002 and Santos’s election in 2006 - and the electoral maps it cooks up for them are, well, they’re weird. Perhaps that explains the show’s truly out-there Electoral College maps. Too many Democrats still think it’s a great model for politics.
