The voters chose Hillary Clinton. Donald Trump won the election. These are facts.
The voters chose Hillary Clinton:
65,853,516 voted for Hillary Clinton.
62,984,825 voted for Donald Trump.
Donald Trump won the election:
Donald Trump won 304 electoral votes.
Hillary Clinton won 227 electoral votes.
The people chose Hillary Clinton and the Electoral College chose Donald Trump. And it’s the Electoral College and not the people who elect the President.
So when somebody looks at those results and argues that the lesson of the election is the Democrats and/or Hillary Clinton did a worse job with connecting to the public than the Republicans and/or Donald Trump did, they are making an argument that defies the facts.
Notice that I am not saying the Democrats won the election or that the Democratic Party is perfect and doesn’t need to change a thing. What I am saying is that the Democrats don’t need to change their “message”. Their message works fine and the voters support their message. What the Democrats need to do is figure out how to translate the support of the voters into a majority in the Electoral College. Or figure out how to have the support of the voters be what decides elections.
Sanders only did so after his Bros and Sandernistas did maximum damage to Hillary by spreading the GOPs and the Kremlins lies. And they kept doing so even after he endorsed Hillary.
Only 55% of Americans voted (a 20 year low in voter participation: 27% for Trump and 28% for Hillary and 45% voted for no one; by contrast in 2008 Obama got 34% and 36% voted for noone).
The difference between Hillary votes and Trump votes nationwide is smaller than the spread in favor of Hillary in California. Hillary got more votes in California on an absolute basis and as a percentage of the vote than any other candidate ever. And she deserved those votes because she campaigned her ass off in California. They might have been more useful elsewhere.
I don’t know if you can really say “America voted for Hillary” It seems too broad.
That’s a product of misinformation on the part of conservatives and voter apathy and also some ignorance among those who vote progressive as well. There’s nothing inherently wrong with the design of the electoral college and it actually responds to a well-documented flaw in the design of simple, pure democracy, which is the power of the mob to control political minorities. It’s possible in our system for political minorities to control the masses in reverse, but that’s not a flaw that can’t be overcome with more motivated voters. Even with the electoral college handicap, a strong majority of similarly minded people have the advantage - they just have to have solidarity and the motivation to vote. For whatever reasons, in 2000 and 2016, they did not.
Why does it matter that Hillary won the popular vote? That’s not the game that was played. If a football team loses 21-17, do we hear them complaining that they won, or should have won, because they had 403 total yards to the winning opponent’s 258?
I mean, that would be a starting point to analyze why their superior offense did not convert into points, but at the end of the day, fair or not, the winner is decided by points.
And in a Presidential election, it is the electoral votes that matter. This rule is well known by everyone prior to the campaign. It is also known that 48 states allocate these voters on a winner take all basis.
Frankly, I believe it is a good system. Without the EC, candidates would never leave the coasts. Candidates would only be responsive to the urban centers. No candidate would ever care about workers in Michigan and Ohio, or coal miners in West Virginia. Ours is a federal system where states matter. Under a direct popular vote system, they would not.
68,931,262 voted for “someone other than Hillary Clinton”. The voters, if they chose anything, chose “someone other than Hillary Clinton”. They cannot have chosen her and someone other than her.
The isolated small states like Rhode Island, surrounded by larger ones, weren’t going to be independent. The slave states, most of which *were *small, had the opportunity to form a contiguous Confederacy. And eventually they did.
Slaveowners like Madison and Jefferson had a lot of hypocritical euphemisms and circumlocutions for it, but that’s what it was essentially about.
Other than raising a LOT of money, I am not sure what metric you are using to say that she ran two of the best campaigns ever. Or are you being sarcastic?
ISTM that the Democrats DID change things when they kicked out Debbie Wasserman Schultz and cleaned house. It may be enough. It may not. I don’t think Democrats can afford to take shit for granted anymore.
And more importantly, voters were not voting “for” Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, Gary Johnson, etc. They were voting for the slate of electors in their home state pledged to these candidates. There are 51 separate elections. They cannot be aggregated together to achieve a certain result.
The match play in golf analogy upthread is the best one. I can’t lose by one hole in match play and then complain that I should have won because my opponent took an octuple bogey on a hole he lost. It simply does not matter in the game that we are playing.
Nope. Virginia was the most populous state in the union.
And New England was thinking about succeeding once.
The Senate/Electoral was set up to make the small states happy and appease those who were afraid of mob rule. Nothing to do with slavery. The 3/5th compromise was about slavery.