The Dems like to trot out the official figures for the 2016 elections for President and note the Hillary actually beat Donald in the popular vote even though she was soundly defeated in the Electoral College. Does this mean that more Americans preferred Clinton over Trump? The answer is --ABSOLUTELY NOT.
Why is that? Let us examine how Presidential elections are handled. All candidates for the Presidency know that it is the Electoral College that needs to be won in order to win the office. So what do they do? They concentrate all their resources and time toward that end. They all employ huge staffs working toward that end and hire high priced consultants to map the road to victory headed by a Campaign Manager. They spend untold hours developing strategies based on expensive polls that they commission, in addition to the national polls that are a daily item in the media. So the entire strategy is aimed toward winning the Electoral College.
Using that strategy they concentrate their resources on so called purple states. That is, states that the campaign strategists consider up for grabs. The only reason they visit states they know they can't win or they consider in their pocket is for fund raising.
For instance, and the perfect example, Clinton nor Trump bothered to actually campaign in California, a state that is so Democratic in bleeds blue. The only reason Hillary showed up at all is to wring money from the rich folks in the bay area, Silicon Valley and the entertainment industry, all strong liberal centers and big supporters of the Dems.
California may be unique in that the people running for all state and federal offices, except President, are the two top vote getters from the primary election. I didn't look it up, so I don't know if other states hold their election the same way or not. I wouldn't be surprised if California stood alone in this type of ballot stuffing, but California isn't known as the land of fruits and nuts for no reason.
So, the ballot for the general election had a lot of offices except the President up for election with nothing but Democrats listed. As a side note, almost all state offices in California, such as Secretary of State, Attorney General, are elected. That was almost universal for those big population centers along the coast, stretching from the bay area south to the border. Republicans, in large numbers see no reason to go to the polls. It was a forgone conclusion that Clinton was going to win the Presidential vote in the state and the candidates for the Senate, House, state and local offices along the coasts were all Dems. Only when you get away from the big coastal centers into the interior of the state do you find a Republican presence. But, inland California does not have the population numbers as does the coastal cities.
So the largest state in the union with over 30 million people has pretty much made the Republicans outsiders to the political process for the moment. So in a system where the Electoral College elects the President, their vote has no weight at all. So they don't bother to vote. Most of them live in districts that are heavily Democratic so the their vote don't mean much for the state offices as well as federal.
That type of scenario is played out in other states, probably to lesser extent because they don't have Californians rigged system, where one party of the other has a commanding majority. The candidates spend no time in those states and the minority party is actually discouraged from even showing up at the polls because their vote is meaningless.
So the conclusion one has to reach is that the popular vote means virtually nothing and is not indicative of what most of people think or how they would have voted if they had a reason to vote. So even counting the popular vote on a nation wide basis has no meaning at all.
But what would happen if the Constitution where amended to change the Presidential election to the popular vote? The entire strategy for conducting a campaign would change. In the last election Trump would have campaigned in California and Clinton would have campaigned in Texas. But, they would not have spent any resources at all, of very little, in the smaller states. The partition of the states into red, blue and purple would have no meaning. The candidates would have to campaign where the votes are, i. e. the big population centers. And, the popular vote would have been quite a bit different for the 2016 election. This is not even a possibility now or in the foreseeable future. The small states wouldn't put up with it.
Under those rules the Republicans in California and New York would have a reason to vote. The Democrats in the so called Red states would have a reason to go to the polls.
Whether that's a good thing or not, the founding fathers considered that the election of the President by state rather than by popular vote to be the best choice. After all we are a nation of united states. It is intended that the states would retain all the power except that detailed in the Constitution. They were very much afraid, and rightly so, that if left to the popular vote, the large states would dominate the political process and sweep the small states aside. In the present environment the nation would be ruled by the coastal states with the great heartland of American largely ignored. That was what they wrote into the constitution and that is what the candidates have to live with.
The message is clear. The popular vote is not a meaningful measure of the population as a whole toward the election of the President.
QED
