If you do this with perfect knowledge and both sides playing optimally, I believe that just ends up being the popular vote, so the democrats win. Whoever has th

If you do this with perfect knowledge and both sides playing optimally, I believe that just ends up being the popular vote, so the democrats win. Whoever has the popular vote simply has more people to shuffle around. I suppose what you mean instead is that each side gets one round, and the new goal is for the democrats to create a distribution which the republicans cannot win by moving people around. I believe that ends up being identical to the knapsack problem since you now simply have the democrats wishing to maximize their margin in each state based on its number of EVs; in fact, I think that's an even more straighforward knapsack problem than the one in the article since we don't have to take the complement. Perhaps you meant something else entirely different, in which case I don't think you described it clearly enough.