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by prodigal_erik 3426 days ago
2% of the popular vote is not a vast majority.

(EDIT: I said "and we aren't even certain about that number because states generally don't keep counting after the state outcome is certain" but I was mistaken).

1 comments

Trump won 46.1% of the popular vote, which means 53.9% of the electorate wanted someone else as president. 8 points is a pretty big difference.

Can you provide evidence that states stop counting votes after it looks there will be a winner in a specific race? Last time i checked, states take several weeks to provide official results because counting all the votes takes a while.

Snopes says I'm wrong and even absentee votes are eventually counted, sorry for the misinfo: http://www.snopes.com/2016/11/13/who-won-the-popular-vote/

We have a first-past-the-post system in which only the top two candidates are viable, so 5.7% of the voters didn't prioritize keeping Trump out of office. If we set the bar at "I think this is the best qualified person on Earth for this office" every elected official has only had a small minority. If we set the bar at "of these two, this one is better" Hillary only won by 2% along with a lot of "don't care".

That's a lot of handwaving and speculation about what was going on in the voters' minds. I'm going to Occam's Razor this and say that ~54% of voters voted for Not Donald Trump.