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Answer from William Murphy, professor of American history:
The electoral college slightly favors the Republican Party right now.
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There is a tendency after every election to believe that this election has established a new normal, that every election which follows will look just like this one. But things change a lot more from election to election, and even more than that over more extended periods of time, than most people realize.
For example, today California is a solidly Democratic state; Republican candidates have no real chance there. But Republican candidates won California in 1968, 1972, 1976, 1980, 1984 and 1988. This includes elections in which Republicans won the presidency (68, 72, 80, 84, 88) and elections they lost (76). Since then, however, Democrats have won California in 1992, 1996, 2000, 2004, 2008 and 2012. The point is, what is true in politics is only true until it is not, and support for the two major political parties tends to shift over time. There's no guarantee that 2020 will look anything at all like 2016.
That being said, it's notable that twice in the last 16 years a Democrat has won the popular vote and lost the electoral vote. This does suggest the electoral vote is currently advantaging the Republican Party. That's very mildly true, but it's easy to overstate the importance of it. It's actually not easy to win the popular vote and lose the electoral vote; you need to really run up the score in a handful of really populous states (like California, New York, Illinois) and then lose very narrowly in a bunch of other states (about 80,000 total votes in three states — Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, cost Clinton the electoral vote. There were about 130,000,000 votes cast overall across the country.)
Right now, there are somewhat more Democratic voters overall. This has actually been true for a long time, and while the numbers of self-identified Republicans and Democrats have both been falling, Democrats still have a numerical edge, which is slightly larger when independents who "lean" toward one party or another are factored in: Democratic, Republican Identification Near Historical Lows.
But increasingly, Democratic voters live in large urban areas, and are concentrated in several parts of the country. There are more of them, somewhat, but they live in relatively compact geographic areas. This gives Republicans a mild advantage in the electoral college; Republican voters are more spread out, and the Electoral College system potentially over-represents them slightly as a part of the overall population. This is, as I said, slight; it does not mean that Democrats cannot win the electoral college, or that Republicans are always more likely to do so. All it means is this: in the event that circumstances line up just right so there is a split between the popular and electoral votes, the split is, for the moment, likely to favor Republicans.
But that's a far cry from having a decisive advantage in the electoral college, because the electoral college is still mostly weighted by population. States have a total number of electoral votes equal to their total representation in the two houses of Congress; seats in the House are apportioned according to population, but every state has two senators. Aside from a handful of states with overwhelmingly large populations (chiefly California, New York, Florida and Texas), there is not enough difference in population among most of the rest of the states to balance out the effect of those two votes every state gets regardless of population, from their two senators. So in a very close election, the possibility of a popular vote/electoral vote split becomes a reality, and if it happens, it is somewhat more likely that it will favor the Republicans. Right now.
But here's another way to look at things. Let's look at the electoral vote totals for the last seven elections (looking at the winners' totals only):
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