TRUMP'S 'LANDSLIDE': 2,623 TO
489 AMONG U.S. COUNTIES, But popular-vote fans say nation
should abandon Electoral College, by Bob Unruh, 12/25/16
The idea isn’t new, but it’s being
argued again over the 2016 presidential election results by some of those who
were shell-shocked by Hillary Clinton’s loss to political upstart Donald Trump:
The nation should decide its presidents based on a popular vote, not the
constitutional Electoral College.
WGN
reported, “It’s official, Clinton swamps
Trump in popular vote,” and while the “swamps” to describe a 2.9 million
difference among some 130 million voters easily could be challenged, the bare
numbers show Clinton got 65,844,954 votes to Trump’s 62,979,879.
But those are not the only numbers
Americans need to know about the heated race that left a leftist movement
stunned and disoriented.
For example, Clinton won California
by 4.2 million votes and New York by 1.6 million, meaning that across 48 of the
50 states, Trump was the victor by about 3 million votes in the popular vote.
Including New York, he was the popular vote winner by more than a million
votes.
Trump has addressed the issue by
tweeting, “Campaigning to win the Electoral College is much more difficult
& sophisticated than the popular vote. Hillary focused on the wrong
states!”
The constitutional reality is that
the nation’s founders set up a system where there would be a popular vote, but
the actual decision is made by 538 members of the Electoral College, members
appointed largely by political parties in the states, with one designated for
each congressional district or U.S. Senate seat in Congress. In many states
they are legally obligated to vote the way their state’s voters do.
There, Trump won 306 on election
night, and ended up with 304 after two, influenced by what has been described
as a “coup” attempt trying to prevent him from taking office, voted against the
wishes of their states’ voters. Hillary Clinton ended up with 227, having lost
five faithless electors of the 232 she won on election night.
Trump said campaigning for the
different votes is different. “I would have done even better in
the election, if that is possible, if the winner was based on popular vote –
but would campaign differently,” he suggested.
The Electoral College was set up to
assure that a handful of population centers across the country cannot in
perpetuity control the presidency. That’s well illustrated by the 2016 results,
where Trump won vast swaths of America, but still came up short in the popular
vote because of the results, essentially, in one state, California.
The Electoral College addresses that
because the minimum number of states a candidate must win, and these include
the large population centers, to win the presidency, is 12 states. And they are
scattered across most of the country, with the exception of the plains states
really.
Under a minimalist approach to the
Electoral College, a candidate must win at least California, Texas, New York,
Florida, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, New
Jersey and any other state with at least 10 votes, (Virginia, for example, has
13) to win.
Vice President-elect Mike Pence put
it in another perspective, revealing that Trump won 30 out of 50 states, and
2,623 counties, to Clinton’s 20 states or 489 counties. The
left-leaning Politifact admitted
Pence’s statement that that was the biggest part of America won in an election
since Ronald Reagan was rated as “mostly true.”
It revealed that Trump, in fact,
“receives credit from electoral specialists for expanding the Republican
footprint, notably in places that had previously backed Barack Obama,”
confirming Trump won 220 counties that had voted for Obama in 2012.
The 2016 results really reveal that
America has become two different nations: far left metropolitan and urban areas
and much more conservative regions of small cities, towns and rural areas. The impact is never so strong as in
a visual image. The blue here reveals how, by the state, voters went for Donald
Trump.
In
the Daily Mail, former House Speaker Newt
Gingrich pointed out “liberals who insisted Trump’s victory is illegitimate
because more Americans voted for Clinton” are simply wrong.
“This is football season. A team can
have more yards and lose the game. What matters is how many points you put on
the board. The Electoral College is the points,” he said.
Gingrich pointed out Trump never
campaigned in California, which for years has leaned far left and routinely has
voted Democratic. “Trump actually carried – in the 49
states outside of California, he had a 1.2 million vote majority,” he said.
“The Democrats had two people
running for the U.S. Senate the way California law works, no Republican running
for the U.S. Senate. So we got beaten in the biggest state. It didn’t matter.
That’s not how you pick the presidency. Trump’s now going to be president.
She’s not going to be president. That’s called winning the game”
In the
Truthfeed blog was the comment: “There are
rules to the contest, and Trump won fair and square. The rest is just noise and
sore loser whining.” Such as a suggestion from Sen.
Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat, to abolish the Electoral College. “The Electoral College is an
outdated, undemocratic system that does not reflect our modern society, and it
needs to change immediately,” she said, after finding out that middle America
states like the Dakotas, Montana, Iowa and others had combined to overrule the
55 votes held by her state.
Gingrich said there are some in the
Democrat party who are simply not going to adjust to a President Trump. “He is, from their standpoint,
horrifying. They live in a delusional world. That’s why they lost the election:
they decided to stay with the delusion.”
Trump critics observed that Clinton
won “every large-sized county economy in the country” while Trump’s victory
came through “hundreds and hundreds of tiny low-output locations.”
The bottom line, from WNG? “More
Americans voted for Hillary Clinton than any other losing presidential
candidate in US history.”
