How Do You Win the Electoral College and Lose the Popular Vote?

While the final vote is not in, it’s clear that Secretary of State Hilary Clinton will win the popular vote while losing the electoral vote to President elect Donald Trump. How is that possible? The answer is the winner take all aspects of the electoral college system. What happened in the 2016 elections, and to a lesser extent in the 2000 election is that the loser (in both cases Democrats), won California and New York by very large margins. In New York her margin was 58.5% to 37.5% and in California it was even larger 61.6% to 33.1% . In those two states alone Clinton received almost 5 million more votes than Trump. On the other while the two states gave Clinton 84 electoral votes, Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin,North Carolina , gaveTrump 92 electoral votes and if you count his victory in all of those states combined they gave him only 930,000 more votes than Clinton. In other words if 1,000,000 people from California or New York had lived in different states the outcome of the election would have been very different.