>"Everybody worked for Trump. He couldn’t lose."
Hillary comfortably won the popular vote, and something like 100,000 voters in strategic states were what swung the election to Trump. "He couldn't lose" is a lot different from "he could win", and is a ridiculously strong claim that nobody who believes in evidence and logic-based reasoning would have made previous to Nov. 9th.
Would that mean there was no way Trump could have lost? No.
It is unclear how using counties as a metric is useful. It would be quite significant if Clinton won the equivalent of the population of LA county over Trump.
The popular vote is a relevant example of how the contest was not inevitable. More people voted for Hillary than for Trump... that's not what wins the election, but it's not meaningless to a democratic society. Counties, however, are completely arbitrary. Should winning the least populous 51% of counties matter to anyone?
You're using it as a convenient way to sidestep the obvious implication of losing the popular vote.
I'd be very careful about that "won the popular vote" meme. First off, it isn't relevant. Second off, if people who were ineligible to vote, aka illegal immigrants and felons (and maybe dead people, too) then what we know about the popular vote is a fallacy, too.
There are lots of other sources with more details, but all of them are considered now "trump shills", so I won't post them, last time I accidentally mentioned one of them (I didn't even knew the place was right-wing, it was the first time I read the site, and happened to be useful for an argument) I got lots of flak and stress.
Which is Not Even Wrong, for it implies the unknowable counterfactual that if Trump had been running a campaign for the popular vote, he wouldn't have won that. E.g. lots of people don't bother to vote when they're in "enemy territory" and they know their vote won't count for anything.
You can't take a situation based on X strategy, and then change the rules to Y strategy after the game has been played by X, and make anything more of it than a silly rhetorical point.
Are you arguing that there's no way Trump could have lost and there was incontrovertible evidence of that prior to election day or that Clinton did not win the popular vote by a wide margin? That's the extent of what I've contended here.
I don't care to discuss abstract hypotheticals, or whether this means Trump is wonderful or not.
Unless you're disputing in a roundabout way what I've presented there's no reason to be engaging in whatever you're doing.
Hillary comfortably won the popular vote, and something like 100,000 voters in strategic states were what swung the election to Trump. "He couldn't lose" is a lot different from "he could win", and is a ridiculously strong claim that nobody who believes in evidence and logic-based reasoning would have made previous to Nov. 9th.