jeffblue101
New member
Here is a great article that offers another insight for Hillary's large poplar vote "win".
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/443254/hillary-clinton-president-california
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/443254/hillary-clinton-president-california
Outside California, Trump outdistanced Hillary by 1.41 million votes, 47.8% to 46.6%. As I have noted before, Hillary’s support was so geographically narrow that she won a popular vote majority in only 13 states (plus DC), the fewest of any major-party candidate since Bob Dole, barely half as many as Obama four years ago. Bill Clinton in 1992 is the only candidate since World War II to win the election without winning a majority in at least 15 states. Trump, who won a majority of the vote in 23 states and won 7 of the 10 largest states, nonetheless had his support spread out much more broadly: his largest total margins of victory were in Texas (807,000 votes) and Tennessee (652,000 votes). By contrast, Hillary also won New York by 1.73 million, Illinois by 944,000, Massachusetts by 904,000, and Maryland by 734,000.
What I wondered, looking at these numbers, was how historically rare it was to see a candidate’s support as concentrated in a single state as Hillary’s. It turns out that it’s rare in post-WWII America, but the trend has varied over time more with population shifts than anything. 13.29% of Hillary’s votes came from California, the most for any candidate from a single state since we went to 50 states. The last candidate to draw more than 13% of his votes from a single state was Tom Dewey in 1944:
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The chart goes back to 1880, the first election after the end of Reconstruction (I listed “51” states for elections from 1964 on that included DC). As you can see, the top 9 candidates on the list – and 11 of the top 12 – lost the election. The top 3 (Al Smith, Dewey and Wendell Willkie) all even lost New York, the state where they got the most votes. It turns out that running candidates with a geographically narrow appeal has always been a losing strategy.
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The lesson, as always, is that nothing in American politics is forever. Populations shift, and the strength of parties in one part of the country or another waxes and wanes. The Electoral College produces anomalous results only in times of flux, when neither party can muster a majority. Before you know it, that will shift again, and we’ll stop talking about the Electoral College and go back to projecting the next “permanent majority.” In the meantime, Democrats need to find a way to reconnect outside of their coastal enclaves to avoid electing another President of California.