She also reiterated her bogus claim that she lost the “closest” election of the 21st Century — a claim she had made recently at her alma mater, Howard University.
Trump beat Harris in the Electoral College last year, 312-226, which was the widest margin this century beyond former President Barack Obama’s two presidential victories in 2008 and 2012. The president also won the popular vote with 77 million votes to Harris’s 75 million.
The electoral college is so wack that I don’t think it’s necessarily incorrect to look at the popular vote when considering the “closeness” of an election, and indeed the 2024 popular vote was the closest this century.
However I think the best metric would be the number of votes needed to flip enough states to win the electoral college, though that of course changes by if they’d be Trump voters or non-voters. Strictly looking at the net difference, though, with 229,766 her margin was wider than both Hillary’s (79,316) and Kerry’s (118,601)
Trump already said it during the 2016 campaign vs. Clinton: if the election was decided by popular vote instead of the Electoral College, he would have campaigned differently. I think that’s true across every election for the winner of that election…they campaigned based on winning the EC. Candidates who went for the popular vote ended up losing the election because that’s not how it works.
So IMHO, it doesn’t matter what the popular vote is because it’s a first-past-the-post system. It’s a shitty, unfair system that should have been eliminated centuries ago. But it’s the system in place whose rules candidates agree to when they participate. Any hypotheticals about the popular vote can be disregarded because they alter the rules too much.
Like the goal in Chess is to capture the king, not capture the most pieces. If the goal is capturing the most pieces, it becomes an entirely different game and the players are making entirely different decisions. Analyzing the Karpov vs. Kasparov 1985 World Championship game by who took the most pieces and is thus actually the best player is a moot exercise.
I’m not saying that it should be the primary metric but I’m saying it’s relevant and can tell us something about how close an election was. We still measure material in chess because it tells us something about how the game is going, even if it’s not the victory condition