He didn't win the popular vote: he won in the electoral college.
The popular vote is the small print in the picture above. It's also the small print in the debate about Trump being US President.
The people are distracted to nebulous "Russian interference" Instead of addressing the glaring problems in US "democracy", which this is a glaring example. Yet no one seems to be willing to address the fact that the electoral college distorts the vote even when it isn't creating a mess like this one.
Elite media outlets do not, for the most part, have an interest in vote counts and what they mean. Coverage of the 2016 election campaign confirmed the extent to which major media are more interested in personalities than facts on the ground. The television networks like to declare a “winner” and then get focused on the palace intrigues surrounding a transition of power. Those intrigues are worth covering. But perspective on the will of the people get lost. Election-night numbers get locked in, and that’s that.
On the other hand, Clinton's margin of victory in the popular vote was larger than John Kennedy's and Richard Nixon's, I've seen a statistic that her popular vote margin was the third largest in US elections! (It was the third highest for someone who lost an election, it was also fairly significant among the people who won the election)
Multiple candidates in American history have been elected president with far smaller margins than Clinton's in the popular vote. According to figures from the Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections—and as alluded to by one Atlantic reader—they include:
Since the final vote count did, indeed, put her well above 2 percentage points ahead of Trump, her margin went beyond those of winning presidential nominees Jimmy Carter in 1976 (2.07 percentage points) and George W. Bush in 2004 (2.47 percentage points). And all this is not to mention the presidents who’ve been elected without winning the popular vote at all. That’s a list that includes Bush in 2000, and Trump.James Garfield in 1880: 0.09 percentage pointsJohn F. Kennedy in 1960: 0.17 percentage pointsGrover Cleveland in 1884: 0.57 percentage pointsRichard Nixon in 1968: 0.7 percentage pointsJames Polk in 1844: 1.45 percentage points
Yet she lost. Trump lost the popular vote by more than any successfully elected president ever. And Clinton lost the election with a pretty hefty amount of popular votes.
So, no Hillary's margin of the popular vote is highly important since it demonstrates how fucked US "democracy" happens to be. There is a reason that the elections take forever: it's that it raises the cost of running for office. Again, the get the money out of politics crowd isn't talking about that aspect of the issue.
I agree with Donald Trump, who in 2012 described the Electoral College a “disaster for democracy.” Trump told CBS’s 60 Minutes after the 2016 election was over that he still agrees with himself—even if he is not prepared to defer to the will of the people in this instance. “I would rather see it where you went with simple votes,” Trump explained. “You know, you get 100 million votes and somebody else gets 90 million votes and you win.”
Stop trying to pin the 2016 election on the Russians since the problems are 100% home grown.
See Also
- Why the fuck do we have the electoral college anyway? Let’s discuss this shit show
- The Electoral College is Profoundly Undemocratic By Design
- Trump owes his victory to America’s unique Electoral College system
- How the Electoral College Rigged the Election for Donald Trump
- The Electoral College effect — in 3 cool charts
- America's Unique and Controversial Electoral College
- 9 Things You May Not Know About the Electoral College
- Hillary Clinton’s Popular-Vote Victory Is Unprecedented—and Still Growing
- Why Electoral College wins are bigger than popular vote ones
- Hillary Clinton's Lead Is Greater Than Multiple Former Presidents'
- Hillary Clinton's popular vote margin is meaningless in every way (except pithy tweets)
No comments:
Post a Comment