How many electoral votes does a candidate need to win the U.S. presidency?

How to get close to this number

Derive it rather than recall it. The explanation gives the construction: seats in the lower chamber, plus seats in the upper chamber, plus three for the federal district. Add those and halve. Any threshold defined as "a majority of a body" is best answered by reconstructing the body's size first, because the total is usually easier to remember than the threshold.

The part people misunderstand is that this is a fixed target rather than a proportion. A candidate needs a set number regardless of turnout, and because most states award all their votes to whoever wins there, the national popular vote and the electoral outcome can diverge. That is not a malfunction; it is the intended mechanism of a federal system.

The tiebreak in the explanation is the genuinely obscure part. If nobody reaches the threshold, the decision passes to the lower chamber voting by state delegation — which has happened only once, two centuries ago. Constitutional systems are full of dormant procedures like this, precisely specified and almost never used.