Hillary Clinton's national popular vote lead just surpassed 2.5 million (1.9%): https://t.co/j58GaxfPmH
— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) December 1, 2016
Clinton 48.2%, Trump 46.3% https://t.co/RdiOa817hd
— Mark Murray (@mmurraypolitics) December 1, 2016
National polls were close to spot on. https://t.co/QGyuqsag04
— Steven Dennis (@StevenTDennis) December 1, 2016
Looks like the Washington Post may have decided the nation needs a Paper of Opposition, since the NYTimes is determined to control the Kneepads Brigade. Phillip Bump, “Trump will be the first modern president to get less than half of the vote in both the primary and general”:
… Trump always likes to say that he received more votes than any previous Republican nominee, which is accurate, but it’s also accurate that a record was set for most votes cast for candidates other than the eventual nominee.
Using data from U.S. Election Atlas and the Congressional Quarterly Guide to Elections, we can plot contests since 1972 (after the reforms that followed the 1968 process) and demonstrate that only five times have major-party nominees earned less than 50 percent of the vote in both the primary and the general — and only once, this year, has that person ended up winning the presidency…
Update: Since someone on Twitter asked, the other four people to get under 50 percent in each contest were John McCain (2008), Michael Dukakis (1988), Walter Mondale (1984) and George McGovern (1972).
Interestingly, both of the last two losing candidates got more of the vote in the general election than did Trump. Trump earned about 46.3 percent of the vote (though ballots are still being counted) to Mitt Romney’s 47.2. (Romney also did better than Trump in nearly half the states.) Hillary Clinton, of course, beat Trump in the popular vote this year, which is where this whole thing started…
More Republicans voted for someone besides Trump than voted for him in the primary, but he won. More Americans voted for Trump’s opponent in the general, but he won.
Had we been saying this about Clinton, I think it’s safe to guess the word Trump would have used to describe her victory: Rigged.
Trump, as is his wont, found the right loopholes to stake his claim to a chunk of an aging, damaged institution (the GOP, in this case) — which he will now, predictably, loot and discard.
But let’s keep reminding him that his “landslide” is really just a Mondale/McGovern/Dukakis/McCain – level #FAIL, artificially inflated into the semblance of a victory by years of Republican vote-suppression, gerrymandering, foreign interference, and warring factions within the national security state. He has no mandate, and neither do the professional GOP asset-strippers like Paul Ryan, who are planning to use Trump as their catspaw.
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Apart from congratulating the pollsters for their accuracy (FWIW), what’s on the agenda for the day?
Thursday Morning Open Thread: PEOTUS Trump, Fraud-in-ChiefPost + Comments (261)