Why Pointing to Trump Losing the Popular Vote is Ridiculous

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Democrats are taking solace in the fact that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in the 2016 election. Some supporters are even using this fact to implore Trump’s electors to overturn the result of the electoral college and install Clinton as the rightful president.

And Trump himself on Sunday night reiterated that he preferred the popular-vote method: “I’m not going to change my mind just because I won. But I would rather see it where you went with simple votes.”

The reactions to that comment were similar — that Trump would have lost the election under his own preferred format!

Neera Tanden tweeted, “I totally agree with Donald Trump that the popular vote winner should determine the Presidency.”

Josh Rogin tweeted, “Trump says he would rather see a simple popular vote determine the president, which means he would have lost. @60Minutes”

Except, it’s impossible to know that for sure.

The fact is that just because Trump lost the popular vote last week doesn’t mean he would have lost a popular-vote election.

What do I mean by that? Basically, losing the popular vote in an electoral-college election isn’t the same as losing the popular vote in a popular-vote election. The former involves a very specific strategy that may cost you when it comes to winning the nationwide popular vote. But you pursue that strategy because the latter doesn’t matter. You need to get to 270 electoral votes, not a majority or plurality of all votes.

An electoral-college election involves making explicit appeals to and advertising in around 10 or 12 out of the 50 states. It means Trump didn’t campaign or advertise in California or Massachusetts or Washington state and that Clinton didn’t campaign in Oklahoma or even Texas (despite polling within single digits there). They knew it would be wasted effort to try and turn a 30-point loss in those states into a 22-point loss, or a 14-point loss into an 8-point loss.

It also means they tailored their messages specifically to voters in key states, which happen to be disproportionately Midwestern and on the East Coast. It meant Trump had little incentive to appeal to Western voters — outside of Nevada, at least. And he pursued a very specific strategy that appealed to the key Rust Belt states that wound up delivering him the presidency.

Would his message have been significantly different in a truly national election, in which he had to appeal to moderate Republicans in Orange County along with conservative former Democrats in coal country? Maybe. Maybe not.

And to be clear, it seems more likely than not that he probably would have lost a race in which the popular vote and not the electoral college decided the president. After all, he currently trails in the popular vote by 0.6 points, and that number is growing as results from California and other coastal states roll in. Clinton’s margin is likely to grow from here — to as much as 2 full points, according to some estimates.

But California is a telling example. In fact, it’s Case Study No. 1 in why Trump might lose the national popular vote by as much as he is.

Numbers tallied by the Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman show Trump is currently trailing in that state 61.5 percent to 33.2 percent. As things stand, that 28-point Democratic win is the biggest since FDR in 1936 — bigger even than Mitt Romney’s 23-point loss in 2012. It’s a bloodbath, and even as Trump did better than Romney, he’s doing worse in California.

There are more than 4 million ballots left to count, but Clinton is already netting nearly 3 million votes in California alone — a number that is bigger than her overall 728,000-vote lead in the nationwide popular vote.

But if Trump simply would have taken 37 percent of the vote in California — the same as Romney took in 2012 — he would currently be about tied with Clinton in the national popular vote. And that’s just an adjustment of about 4 points in one inconsequential (albeit huge) presidential state.

Those were votes, of course, that neither he nor his campaign needed, and so they didn’t even try to get them. Had he and Clinton both sought them and made direct appeals to Californians, perhaps the margin would have been similar. But we’ll never know for sure.

What we do know, though, is that less-competitive states tend to have lower turnout. According to the United States Election Project, several swing state ranked in the top 10 in turnout: New Hampshire, Iowa, Wisconsin, Colorado, Virginia and Florida. California currently ranks 44th in turnout. Only an estimated 53 percent of its voting-eligible population has had their ballots counted (including the 4-plus million that haven’t been tallied). Making states like California consequential seems likely to draw a significantly different — or at least significantly expanded — electorate.

Trump’s deficit is growing and could soon be historically large for the winner of the electoral college. But it’s simply impossible to say for sure that it means he would have lost a popular-vote election.

(c) 2016, The Washington Post · Aaron Blake 

{Matzav.com}


6 COMMENTS

  1. This article is exactly right – both Trump and Hillary campaigned based the rules as they currently exist. Had they campaigned for the popular vote it’s impossible to say what would’ve happened and we could’ve seen any of the following scenarios:
    -Hillary wins with the same popular percentage margin she actually received.
    -Hillary wins by an even larger margin.
    -Hillary wins by a smaller margin.
    -Trump wins.

    We would’ve seen both candidates campaigning in Democratic strongholds New York and California as well as Republican stronghold Texas.

    Saying that Hillary should be declared the winner by changing the rules after the fact makes as much sense as declaring the 2016 World Series a tie since both teams scored 27 runs apiece.

  2. This election shows why the electoral college is needed. Just look at the election map Trump won about 30 states. Almost all the states eat of California and west of New York. As you pointed out California gave Clinton a lopsided win there. So my question is you can have 3 – 4 liberal states that give Clinton a win but what about the majority of the states that want Trump.

  3. Seeing as Mr. Trump out performed both Mr. Romney and Mr. McCain in many counties and states, and seeing as Mr. Trump attracted a record number if Democrats who, being working class people, were perhaps the hardest hit financially by the policies of the Obama administration, it is very possible that if presidents were elected by straight popular vote, Mr. Trump would have brought his platform and plans for economic recovery and growth including jobs and tax decreases (and national security, health care, etc.) to States such as California, and may very well had convinced them as well in great numbers. Remember, the House of Representatives and the Senate are elected through popular vote exclusively. Governors throughout the entire 50 states are elected through popular vote exclusively. The Republican party has a majority in both houses and a majority of governors are now Republicans. Electoral College or not, the Republican party, nation wide, has raised their collective voiced and they have been heard.

  4. BTW, here’s an interesting bit of electoral trivia: Of the seven presidential elections we’ve had since 1992, the Democratic candidate has gotten more popular votes than the Republican candidate in six of them. The one exception? 2004, where George W. Bush received more popular votes than John Kerry.

    Bill Clinton has now seen his Vice President (Al Gore) and his wife (Hillary) lose elections in which they each got more popular votes than their Republican opponents.

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