The Fact is Hillary Clinton won the popular vote with 65,853,516 (48.5%
votes) to Trump's 62,984,825 (46.4% votes), but lost in the electoral
college by receiving 232 (43.1%) of the electoral votes to Trump's 306
(56.8%) votes. But some people don't want to admit that the Electoral College is pretty much what put Trump in place. Probably because most people have not idea what the fuck the Electoral College does.
Quite simply it invalidates the popular vote.
Anyway, somebody was trying to tell me that Clinton would have won if Green voters in Michigan and Pennsylvania had voted for her. That argument is obviously fallacious, but It’s easy to see why people point the finger at third-party votes.
In Michigan, where the election was so close that the Associated Press still hadn’t called the result until some time after the election. Trump was ahead by about 12,000 votes at that time. That was significantly less than the 242,867 votes that went to third-party candidates in MichiganOn the other hand, Clinton would have still lost even if she had managed to win the popular vote in either Michigan or Pennsylvania.
That's because of how the Electoral College works. Clinton would have won 248 Electoral College votes if the 232 Votes had been supplemented only with Michigan's Electoral votes. She would have had 252 Electoral votes if she have won only Pennsylvania's Electoral College votes. Even with winning Michigan's and Pennsylvania's Electoral College votes, she would have fallen short of the 270 electoral College votes by 2 votes (268). Trump still wins in any of those three possible outcomes.
Clinton needed to win all three states, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, to get the 270 Electoral Votes needed to win.
There's a reason why the Interactive Electoral College map site is called https://www.270towin.com/. As they point out:
Since electoral votes are generally allocated on an "all or none" basis by state, the election of a U.S President is about winning the popular vote in enough states to achieve 270 electoral votes, a majority of the 538 that are available. Receiving the most votes nationwide is irrelevant, as we have seen in two of the most recent five presidential elections where the electoral vote winner and the popular vote winner were different.There are a lot of other problems with trying to blame the Third Parties for Clinton's loss (especially since Gary Johnson received a larger percentage of the vote than Jill Stein).
One of the major reasons I left the Democratic Party, and the duopoly, is that Election Reform is a really big issue in US politics. Only the Third parties were discussing this.
The 2016 Election also demonstrated that voting was pretty much meaningless. The primaries are a sham and rigged to eliminate candidates from running (cost). And the Presidential Election is really a sham with the Electoral College in Place.
The Electoral College is one of the glaring flaws in US politics, but people want to blame everything but the flawed system for the problems we see.
See Also
- Did Jill Stein voters deliver Donald Trump the presidency?
- No, Jill Stein Did Not Cost Hillary Clinton the White House
- Did third-party candidates Jill Stein and Gary Johnson lose Clinton the election?
- Jill Stein: Democratic Spoiler Or Scapegoat? | FiveThirtyEight
- The Electoral College Was Meant to Stop Men Like Trump From Being President
- The Electoral College is Profoundly Undemocratic By Design
- Trump owes his victory to America’s unique Electoral College system
- How the Electoral College Rigged the Election for Donald Trump
- The Electoral College effect — in 3 cool charts
- America's Unique and Controversial Electoral College
- 9 Things You May Not Know About the Electoral College
- Hillary Clinton’s Popular-Vote Victory Is Unprecedented—and Still Growing
- Why Electoral College wins are bigger than popular vote ones
- Hillary Clinton's Lead Is Greater Than Multiple Former Presidents'
