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by makomk
2350 days ago
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This is a particularly important counterargument when talking about the 2016 presidential election, since Clinton seems to have been the only candidate who was actually trying to win the popular vote. She put a bunch of campaigning resources into places like California which would increase her popular vote share but wouldn't affect the result. Trump's campaign, on the other hand, was by all accounts focused on simply getting enough electoral college votes to actually win. This was pretty obvious from their respective postmortems in the press. The idea that a particular candidate was cheated because they won a symbolic but politically irrelevant victory that the competition wasn't even trying for is not a particularly good argument. In fact, it's positively Trumpian; he famously used the "popular vote" argument to discredit Obama's victory. |
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What Clinton was trying to do was not so much “win the popular vote” but “maximize down-ballot coattails associated with an expected electoral victory” (and, thereby, assure that members of Congress of her party felt thet owed her.)
It's perhaps worth remembering that inability to marshal support from Congressional reps of his own party, particularly it's liberal wing, is what handed her husband two stinging early embarrassments (one of which was defeat on an issue she was the face of): the lesser being NAFTA passing with strong Republican support but widespread and strong Democratic opposition, and the greater being the humiliating defeat of Clinton's signature campaign initiative, health care reform.