{"id":287010,"date":"2016-12-23T19:58:15","date_gmt":"2016-12-23T18:58:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=287010"},"modified":"2016-12-23T19:59:10","modified_gmt":"2016-12-23T18:59:10","slug":"u-s-presidency-important-hillarys-2864974-popular-vote-win","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/u-s-presidency-important-hillarys-2864974-popular-vote-win\/","title":{"rendered":"The U.S. Presidency: How Important Is Hillary\u2019s 2,864,974 Popular-Vote Win?"},"content":{"rendered":"

California alone accounted for all of Hillary\u2019s popular-vote win, plus 1,405,004 votes.<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

Eric Zuesse, originally posted at\u00a0strategic-culture.org<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

America\u2019s Electoral College \u2014 the publicly elected representatives who select the U.S. President \u2014 voted on Monday, December 19th, and chose Donald Trump as America\u2019s next President, though Hillary Clinton had won nearly three million more of the nation\u2019s popular votes on November 8th<\/span><\/span> than he did. (The Electoral College vote was 304 Trump, to 227 Clinton.)<\/span><\/p>\n

Here was the top of the\u00a0homepage of the anti-Trump (and anti-Russia) Huffington Post, in America<\/span><\/a>, on Monday<\/span><\/span> night, December 19th, focusing on Hillary Clinton\u2019s\u00a0having won more people\u2019s votes than Trump did:<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

\"screen-shot-2016-12-19-at-6-40-03-pm\"<\/p>\n

How significant is it that Ms. Clinton had won the votes of more Americans, but Mr. Trump has won the votes of more Electors? Here are the relevant facts, by which to understand this:<\/span><\/p>\n

In some respects, the United States of America is a federal system, not a unitary state system. The U.S. Constitution established the nation that way, and it remains in effect to this day. The Electoral College chooses the nation\u2019s President, and it consists of Electors who represent their individual states, but it\u2019s constructed according to a formula (for weighting each state\u2019s influence in selecting a President) that apportions the number of Electors so as to correlate rather closely with each given state\u2019s population. Thus, the Electoral College is partly a unitary-state system (one-person-one-vote), and partly a federal-state system (each state having different-sized delegations in the Electoral College, depending upon each state\u2019s population-size).<\/span><\/p>\n

America\u2019s by-far largest state, California, accounts, all on its own, for the entirety of Hillary Clinton\u2019s popular-vote victory \u2014 and more besides.<\/span><\/p>\n

Her win of the U.S. popular vote was two-thirds the size of her win of the California popular-vote. The one state of California accounts for 1.49 times her win of the national vote. California accounted for all of her 2,864,974 national-vote win,\u00a0plus<\/b>\u00a0an additional 1,405,004 votes.<\/span><\/p>\n

Figures here are from\u00a0https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/United_States_presidential_election,_2016<\/span><\/a>,\u00a0as of 19 December 2016:<\/span><\/p>\n

Hillary\u2019s California victory-margin over Trump:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

CA 4,269,978<\/span><\/p>\n

Hillary\u2019s nationwide popular-vote victory-margin:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

U.S. 2,864,974<\/span><\/p>\n

Hillary\u2019s nationwide 2% win by 2,864,974 votes would have been a nationwide loss by 1,405,002 votes, if she had won California by 50%+1 vote, to 50%-1 for Trump. Instead, she won California by 61.73%, to 31.62%. (Furthermore, in the Electoral College, almost all states have established a winner-take-all-rule, so that, for\u00a0example<\/span><\/a>,\u00a0\u201call 55 of California\u2019s Electoral votes go to the winner of the state election, even if the margin of victory is only 50.1 percent to 49.9 percent\u201d \u2014 in other words, she didn\u2019t win any more Electoral College votes from her 61.73% California landslide win than she would have won by a bare 50%+1 win of California).<\/span><\/p>\n

Hillary\u2019s 4,269,978-vote win of California was 1.49 times \u2014 49% larger than \u2014 her nationwide 2,864,974-vote win.<\/span><\/p>\n

In addition, Hillary also scored big wins in three other big liberal states: NY, IL, and MA.<\/span><\/p>\n

The following 3 states total to\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

3,592,220 votes:<\/span><\/p>\n

NY 1,702,792<\/span><\/p>\n

IL\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>944,714<\/span><\/p>\n

MA\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>904,303<\/span><\/p>\n

The grand total of the 4 states (NY, IL, MA, and CA):\u00a0<\/span>7,862,198<\/span><\/p>\n

But, even if Hillary had won those three states by only around 50-50, her 4,269,978-vote edge over Trump in CA would still have been 4,269,978 – 3,592,220 = 677,758 popular votes more than Trump in these four mega-liberal states together (as compared to her actual win there of 7,862,198 popular votes). That would have switched 7,862,198 – 677,758 = 7,184,440 of her votes to Trump, and so he still would have won clearly the popular vote. He and she wouldn’t have done any differently in the Electoral College than they have, in fact, done, but Trump would have scored a huge win in the nationwide popular vote \u2014 a much bigger win in the popular vote than Hillary has, in fact, won.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

If the nation had violated the Constitution and handed Ms. Clinton the win due to her 2,864,974 popular-vote victory, then it would have been handing the entire Presidency to the winner of the biggest state, and written off all the rest of the United States \u2014 where Clinton lost overwhelmingly. Fortunately, that didn\u2019t happen.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The evidence therefore shows that Trump won the Presidency by strategizing strictly upon the basis of the U.S. Constitution, and not \u2014 as Hillary evidently did \u2014 at least partly upon the national popularity-contest. He devoted his resources to the key toss-up states, and ignored the states \u2014 including CA, NY, IL, and MA \u2014 where the polling showed that his campaigning would be an utter waste of his time and money.<\/span><\/p>\n

The four mega-liberal states \u2014 New York, California, Illinois, and Massachusetts \u2014 happen\u00a0also<\/i>\u00a0to be America\u2019s four national-\u2018news\u2019-media centers; and, so, this reality, and Trump\u2019s win of the election (the Electoral College), naturally strikes many in the national press (such as the owners of the Huffington Post) as being wildly at variance with their \u2018rational\u2019 expectations, because those people aren\u2019t so intelligent, and they reason upon the basis of mental structures different from the reality. (Maybe they\u2019re also stupid enough to believe her campaign-rhetoric even though it contrasted sharply with her actual decisions and policies as a government-official.) Furthermore, they\u2019re wildly out-of-touch with the pain throughout the rest of the country, and they accept the aristocracy\u2019s false analysis of its causes and of its solutions (the cause\u00a0isn\u2019t<\/i>\u00a0bigotry against women, minorities, etc.; it\u2019s their\u00a0own<\/i>\u00a0bigotry against the poor \u2014 of\u00a0any<\/i>\u00a0group); so, they think that Hillary was \u2018obviously\u2019 better than Trump, and can\u2019t imagine that she\u2019s worse (or even worse, if Trump too is bad) than Trump. This blindness-to-reality enables the \u2018news\u2019 media to support vigorously the Democratic Party\u2019s attempts to de-legitimize Trump as President. They believe strongly in the aristocracy\u2019s ideology (that the barrier to equality-of-opportunity is more an ethnic bigotry than it is a class-bigotry) and so they continue to obsess upon ethnicity, gender, etc., even after the past year\u2019s political results, both in the U.S. and in Europe, are showing how divorced from the reality, they actually are.<\/span><\/p>\n

This explains why the owners of America\u2019s \u2018news\u2019 media tend to be both perplexed and angry that Hillary Clinton (whose basic campaign theme was that there is no class-problem in America, but only many different bigotry-problems) lost this election.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014<\/span><\/p>\n

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of\u00a0\u00a0They\u2019re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010<\/i><\/span><\/a>,<\/i>\u00a0and of<\/span>\u00a0\u00a0<\/i>CHRIST\u2019S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity<\/i><\/span><\/a><\/span>.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

California alone accounted for all of Hillary\u2019s popular-vote win, plus 1,405,004 votes. Eric Zuesse, originally posted at\u00a0strategic-culture.org America\u2019s Electoral College \u2014 the publicly elected representatives who select the U.S. President \u2014 voted on Monday, December 19th, and chose Donald Trump as America\u2019s next President, though Hillary Clinton had won nearly three million more of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1254,"featured_media":287012,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-287010","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-breaking-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287010","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1254"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=287010"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287010\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/287012"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=287010"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=287010"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=287010"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}