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No matter whom Republicans nominate to face Hillary Rodham Clinton in November2016, that candidate will start at a disadvantage. Its not polling, Clintons deep rsum or the improving state of the economy. Its the electoral college.

Yes, the somewhat arcane yet remarkably durable way in which presidential elections are decided tilts toward Democrats in 2016, as documented by nonpartisan political handicapper Nathan Gonzales in a recent edition of the Rothenberg & Gonzales Political Report.

Gonzales notes that if you add up all of the states that are either safe for the eventual Democratic nominee or favor that nominee, you get 217 electoral votes. (A candidate needs to win 270 to be elected president.) Do the same for states safe or favoring the Republican standard-bearer, per Gonzaless rankings, and you get just 191 electoral votes.

That Democratic advantage becomes even more pronounced if you add to the partys total the states that lean Democratic, according to Gonzales. Put Pennsylvania (20 electoral votes), Iowa (6) and Nevada (6) into the Democratic column and the partys electoral vote count surges to 249 just 21 votes short of winning a third straight presidential race. (Gonzales doesnt rate any states as lean Republican.)

Such a scenario is decidedly realistic given that President Obama not only won all three of those lean Democratic states in 2008 and 2012 but that he did so by an average of eight points in Iowa and nine points in Nevada. And, the last Republican presidential nominee to carry Pennsylvania was George H.W. Bush, way back in 1988.

Gonzaless analysis, which some will dismiss as premature but I applaud (its never too early!), reaffirms one of the most important and undercovered story lines in presidential politics in the past decade: the increasing Democratic dominance in the electoral college.

After the near-ties of the 2000 and 2004 elections, Obama ushered in this new era. He won 365 electoral college votes in his sweeping 2008 victory and, perhaps even more surprisingly, 332 electoral votes in the 2012 election, which was regarded by many neutral observers as something close to a tossup going into Election Day.

This harks back to the sort of upper hand that Republicans enjoyed in the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan won 489 electoral votes in 1980 and 525 electoral votes in 1984; Bush followed that up with 426 electoral votes in 1988.

Democrats are hoping for a similar run in 2016, and theres some reason to believe it might happen. Of the six states with the largest number of electoral votes (the number of House members plus two for their U.S. senators), only one Texas (38 electoral votes) is safely in the Republican column, and California (55), New York (29) and Illinois (20) are all safely Democratic, according to Gonzales.

Then there is the fact that Democrats have become increasingly dominant among Hispanics, which has turned states such as Nevada, New Mexico and, to a lesser extent, Colorado, much more friendly to their side. Consider this: In 2004, George W. Bush won New Mexico over John F. Kerry. About a decade later, neither party spent a dime in the Land of Enchantment, and Obama won it by 10 points. (This trend, if not disrupted by Republicans, will make Arizona and Georgia potentially competitive by the 2020 election.)

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In 2016 race, an electoral college edge for Democrats