I don’t know if I agree with you, though. The EC system was in part created with the understanding that voters in different regions have different political interests and viewpoints. Hillary Clinton may have been, technically speaking, the more popular candidate based on the total raw numbers, but I don’t think we should dismiss the fact that her vote was concentrated in highly urban areas. I would say the same about Trump as well: his popularity was largely confined to specific demographics. What is probably most accurate is two Americas are forming and one really wants nothing to do with the other.
I think Mr. Biden awful, but I have no doubt he would have won against Trump.
I’m not dismissing the fact that her popularity was more concentrated; in fact, I specifically raised it as a caveat. And I agree that America is a country divided. Neither of those points, however, detract from the point that claiming that people who use the popular vote as a metric for popularity “don’t understand the Electoral College” is a bullshit argument based on moving the goalposts.
And the proponents of one set of interests and viewpoints exploits the system to rule over the larger group of opposing proponents. Somehow, I don’t think that’s what the FF’s intended.
No, there are people that talk about the Electoral College like it was some last-minute surprise instead of the way Presidential elections have worked as long as the US has had a president. The people asking questions like “How could the person who won the popular vote not win the election?” are the same ones who appear to be surprised that Republicans play politics to win, even though they’ve been doing it for decades now. The cries of ‘it’s not fair’ are no better at winning elections than holding giant rallies in states that are solidly blue and ignoring swing states.
Well, you should go talk to the people pulling that bait and switch. Those aren’t any of the people I’m talking about though.
All it indicates that she wasted lots of money and effort racking up popular vote count instead of actually winning the election.
He would have been helpless against the right-wing media saying what Bernie has been saying for the last thirty years - that he is a socialist. This is hardly fact-irrelevant.
Bernie would have lost the popular vote too. Because accusations that he is a socialist are 100% true and relevant. He couldn’t even get the nomination from the left-side party. In the general election, he would have lost by roughly the same margin as he lost in the primaries.
Regards,
Shodan
What’s worse is people who think that if we did have a popular vote for the president, that you could just take the vote totals we got in our EC system and port them over, unchanged, to predict the outcome of Popular Vote election. They don’t seem to realize that campaigning would be different under a Popular Vote system and so you cannot expect the results to be the same.
Anyone who plays golf knows that you play a different game when it’s match play vs stroke play. And we all play golf, right? 
Yeah, she’s done alright. Clinton is toast. The fat lady has sung.
Oddly though, she keeps on courting press attention.
Nevermind, I’m sure she knows that no one has come back from such devastating defeats, and will make her plans accordingly.
But that’s assuming Donald Trump is a brilliant political strategist who got elected by designing a perfect campaign tailored to our nation’s electoral laws. Which is not a view that’s strongly supported by reality.
It seems more likely that Trump stumbled into a victory by pure luck; he ran a campaign that appealed to angry rural white people and just got lucky that our electoral system gives rural white people a disproportionate amount of political strength. But if the electoral system had been different, he would have run the same campaign just with a different outcome.
As an outsider to the political process who didn’t even have the support of his own party, he managed beat an allegedly more ‘qualified’ candidate who had the support of her own party and significantly more campaign money. The fact that he beat someone who’s career is politics in a political endeavor is a pretty strong reality check on the idea that it was some kind of act of God that he won.
Assuming that your opponents operate entirely by luck and that one should not ever examine their strategies because they just ‘got lucky’ is the kind of thing that loses elections. And exactly what I’d expect Hillary to do if she ran again. Trump or someone on his team did have a good strategy for winning the election, and people who want to win elections (rather than lose and act surprised at 200 year old systems) would do well to study what he did. But don’t take my word for it, take a look at: Donald Trump Had A Superior Electoral College Strategy | FiveThirtyEight
The view that’s strongly supported by reality is this one -
Regards,
Shodan
No, it doesn’t assume that at all. It just assumes that he ran a better campaign than Hillary did. You know, the woman who ran a campaign where she tried to win the popular vote and he didn’t?
**Will Hillary Clinton Run for President Again?
**
Let us all cross our fingers and pray to the deity of our choice that the answer is a resounding NO!
Well sure. He is a socialist, and guess what, that’s firmly out of the mainstream. Sure, this was a change election. Not that much change.
My point is, the Republicans would just have to go back over his record of left wing pronouncements and positions and start publicizing them, and they’d barely have to take most of them out of context. Hillary Clinton did not spend one minute demonizing Sanders over his socialist left wing record, she didn’t have to, and she didn’t want to annoy the left wing fringe because she needed them to vote for her in the general election. And during the primary, the Right Wing media didn’t bother going after Sanders, because he was causing trouble for History’s Greatest Monster, Hillary Clinton.
All that disappears once Sanders somehow wins the Democratic primary.
You left out two things:
[ol]
[li]She was completely tone deaf to the things that made her opponent appeal to his supporters.[/li][li]She took for granted the blue-collar voters and Reagan Democrats in states like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.[/li][/ol]
What struck me was the lopsided candidate field, the Republicans offered up seventeen (17) standard issue (for the most part) failure theater squishes, who are expected to gracefully apologize for something they never did. And yet another Bush. Talk about tone deaf. Mencken once said (paraphrased) “Democrats fuck shit up, Republicans make sure it stays that way.” And that was 100 years ago.
And in the other corner - one democrat candidate, Felonia von Pantsuit, and her “beard”, Bernie Sanders. I don’t imagine Bernie was expected or designed to win the primary, nor would he be allowed to if it came to that. Seems to me there was a lot of jiggery-pokery in the primaries when Ron Paul ran as a Republican. Speaking of, how is it that Sen. Sanders was allowed to run in a Democratic primary? He’s not a Democrat. He’s got his Dacha now, though. Was he truly serious about running? It seems kind of bizarre to only have one candidate for the primary? Has that happened in the past regularly?
Anyone can register with the party and run. There is not politburo or Guardian Council to evict them. Also, I suspect a lot of Democrats chose not to run since Hillary was assured of winning the nomination. Actually, Bill had a bit of that himself back in '92 as Bush the elder was riding high in popularity when the primaries were getting underway, discouraging some Democrats from even attempting a run. Who knew his popularity would sink like a stone by the time of the general election?
Hmm…let me see. What was the estimate of free media coverage Trump got? Let’s see, I believe it was $2 BILLION. In the prjmaries. Spare me about how cash-poor he was. He did one of the two things he’s good at, which is being stupidly obnoxious in public. And the media fell for it hook, line, and sinker. (The other thing, btw, is being an unscrupulous bully.)
Let’s not forget Comey sabotaging the campaign two weeks before the election, and Russia interfering, and a number of other factors out of control of the Clinton campaign. If you’re not a Trumpist, you should ask for a job immediately, because you sure as hell sound like one. Trump couldn’t plan his way out of a paper bag, and if you believe the stories Kushner was the mastermind. But even then, the odds are pretty good that without Comey and Russia Trump would be at home right now crying in his nonalcoholic beer.
Maybe a bit of no. 1. Although I think the voters were the ones “tone deaf.” I hear a lot of no. 2, but I don’t agree. I recall a lot of appeal to them and their concerns.