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Fun history lesson: the founders did not care about popular vote. They feared democracy for it's ability to reward demagoguery. Which is why they had the electoral college. What people who "say, well he won the electoral college so..." miss is that he actually has not won the electoral college. The electoral college isn't some math equation: they're people. The popular vote decides what electors will vote for their state. The electors pledge themselves to a candidate and some state laws make that binding, but the founding fathers would disagree. Those pledged for Clinton can choose to vote Trump and those pledged to Trump can vote Clinton, according to the founding fathers.
Granted, this is not a lesson much talked about because it sounds undemocratic. And it is. That was the point, actually. I fully support this personally. The original constitution was actually written quite interestingly in terms of how offices were picked. The House was popular vote in individual districts, Senate was chosen by state legislature, and the executive office was chosen by electors who were chosen by the people but not actually bound to their wishes. It was pretty balanced really. Alas, now all legislative offices are popular votes and the executive may as well be too given the electoral college is not longer allowed to have a conscious.
The popular vote exists within the context of the electoral college vote. People go to the polls knowing about the electoral college, knowing that they are voting for their state's electors and not directly for the president. This matters because this effects how people vote and whether they choose to vote at all. If you live in a state that is overwhelmingly red or blue you may choose to stay home because you figure the outcome is already certain, but if you thought your state was up for grabs you would have gotten up and voted. You may also choose to vote third party because you know your vote won't really effect the outcome of the race, while you might have chosen to vote for one of the major party candidates if you thought the outcome was uncertain.
My point is that we know who won the popular vote within the context of the electoral college but we don't know who would have won in a pure head to head matchup. We don't know which California republicans would have shown up to vote or which Utah voters would have voted GOP instead of independent or which Texas democrats would have shown up for Hillary. We do know that in states that were close, people tended to show up more for Trump than for Hillary, but that trend only shows up in the electoral vote not the popular vote.
The popular vote count is not a valid gauge of the will of the people in the context of an American presidential election. We do not know who would have won in a head to head matchup so pointing at Hillary's popular vote total does not delegitimize Trump's victory in any way.
Even if Clinton and Trump had split the electoral vote 268-268 the popular vote still wouldn't have mattered. The popular vote would not have been the tie breaker, congress would have. The house would decide the president and the Senate would decide the vice president. Even in an electoral tie the popular vote was not intended to decide the election. Perhaps the founders understood that the popular vote would not have mattered even in an electoral tie because it was never a straight up head to head vote to begin with.
It's not suprising to see the same folks who blamed Bush for everything while their man obama was pulling the levers for eight years, now trying to fashion some type of Hillary victory in the face of her loss. Denial runs deep.
I'm not a statist therefore I did not vote
Good thinking :-) I'll assume since Bush II was responsible for pretty much everything bad that happened on Obama's watch, the liberals will continue, for at least the first year or two of Trumps presidency, to continue blaming Bush II for the bad things that happen. Trump will get a pass....lol. I mean you can't honestly believe that Bush's culpability could just end on some arbitrary day....let's say January 20th right ? The odds of that would be beyond belief.
We keep hearing about her leading in the popular vote....and yes, she is in fact. However, we've been running Presidential elections this way since the founding of the Republic....so we should throw this system overboard suddenly just because someone's preferred candidate didn't win ? Talk about setting in place long term consequences to solve a very short term (4 years) problem. Perhaps I'll just cash in the kids college fund because I want a boat for the 4th of July weekend party....yeah, that makes sense.
When HRC was going to win the election, the electoral college wasn't even on the radar....suddenly it's a hot topic. If anyone would care to read about the reasons for the electoral college (which I did recently), at least we could have an honest, and perhaps productive conversation on the merits, or lack thereof of the system. But what we keep hearing is, she won the popular vote and didn't win...that's not fair. I'm guessing 90% of those people commenting don't really know why the system was set in place at the founding of our country.
As someone said previously, she, and everyone who voted for that matter, knew the rules going into the contest, so now it's over, everyone had the same rules applied to them that we've been using for 200 plus years. Why is this suddenly a problem ?
The votes keep coming in. Hillary Clinton now has, remarkably, 2.5 Million more votes than Trump. She has more votes than any President in history, except for Obama.
Wow. Good to know that more than half the country wasn't fooled by trickery and carnival barking. The "blue collar" President who lives in a gilded cage and thinks the White House is too low class for him to live in. It gives us all hope that most of the country saw through it.
But she still lost. It has never been about the popular vote.
The votes keep coming in. Hillary Clinton now has, remarkably, 2.5 Million more votes than Trump. She has more votes than any President in history, except for Obama.
Wow. Good to know that more than half the country wasn't fooled by trickery and carnival barking. The "blue collar" President who lives in a gilded cage and thinks the White House is too low class for him to live in. It gives us all hope that most of the country saw through it.
Yipee! Hillary won the popular vote. She's gonna be our country's, ugh, hmmm. What do we do with her? So where do we go from here OP?
Maybe Trump can appoint Hillary as Secretary of Fundraising. She's really good at raising millions of dollars from foreigners with pay to play and not getting caught. This way Trump and Hillary can both enrich themselves because after all, we all know that Trump was a Clinton plant.
The votes keep coming in. Hillary Clinton now has, remarkably, 2.5 Million more votes than Trump. She has more votes than any President in history, except for Obama.
Wow. Good to know that more than half the country wasn't fooled by trickery and carnival barking. The "blue collar" President who lives in a gilded cage and thinks the White House is too low class for him to live in. It gives us all hope that most of the country saw through it.
Do you have a quarter ?
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