It's Official: Clinton's Popular vote win came entirely from

Posted: Dec 18, 2016

Democrats who are having trouble getting out of the first stage of grief — denial — aren't being helped by the fact that, now that all the votes are counted, Hillary Clinton's lead in the popular vote has topped 2.8 million, giving her a 48% share of the vote compared with Trumps 46%. To those unschooled in how the United States selects presidents, this seems totally unfair. But look more closely at the numbers and you see that Clinton's advantage all but disappears. As we noted in this space earlier, while Clinton's overall margin looks large and impressive, it is due to Clinton's huge margin of victory in one state — California — where she got a whopping 4.3 million more votes than Trump. California is the only state, in fact, where Clinton's margin of victory was bigger than President Obama's in 2012 — 61.5% vs. Obama's 60%. But California is the exception that proves the true genius of the Electoral College — which was designed to prevent regional candidates from dominating national elections. ;