More Electoral College

Yes, yes, yes, the "libs" don't like the Electoral College when their candidate loses the election while getting more votes, in this case 2.5 million more 48.1% to 46.4%; the President-Elect didn't like it when he thought Obama won while losing the popular vote, but he guesses it's okay now.

I've heard some, in my opinion, ridiculous statements by people who are presumably Trump supporters. A lot of Clinton supporters, as well as others who were against Trump, make a point that Clinton got more votes, many more votes, than Trump did. While that's interesting, and points to (1) the fact that we are a very divided nation and (2) despite the big Electoral College win, there is no mandate from "the people"; it's largely irrelevant to the question of "who is our next President?". Both Clinton and Trump knew the rules and both campaigned in order to win the most electoral votes, not the most popular votes.  Although it's fun to prod Trump with the knowledge that he garnered less votes than "Crooked Hillary". One of the most ridiculous comebacks that Trump supporters, and even Trump himself, have put forward, is that Clinton really didn't win the popular vote, or that 3 million illegal immigrants voted for her, resulting in Trump gaining more legal votes. Another one that I heard is that if you count up the counties that each candidate "won", Trump received a majority of votes in approximately 2600 counties to Clinton's 500, as if this is somehow a significant statistic. Counties aren't like congressional districts, which each have similar populations (not exactly the same, since a state can have no less than one district) but are artifacts from earlier times. In Nebraska we have counties with less than 500 people, as well as counties with several million people. There are congruent situations all over the nation, so why bring up that meaningless figure? Because, somehow, Trump supporters can then assert that their guy won more of the nation, in addition to the electoral votes. They then derisively characterize the Clinton vote as having "won a couple of big cities", as if the almost 65 million votes were all from Los Angeles and New York City. The follow up to this is that we, as Americans, wouldn't want people "who are not like us", i.e. the city dwellers, to decide who our President should be, as if city folks aren't real Americans.

That brings us back to the recurring argument for keeping the Electoral College as it is: that by relying on the popular vote, the President would be decided by a handful of big cities. Los Angeles is 3.8 million, Chicago 2.7 million, and New York 8.4 million. That's 14.9 million out of 134.8 million total votes cast, those 3 huge, generally Democratic voting, cities together account for 11.05% of the votes cast, the number would be somewhat smaller if we added up the voting population. The total US population is 318 million, and since it looks like only 42% of the total population voted, the voting population of those 3 cities can be calculated as only 4.7% of votes cast. Add to that the fact that surely some  of the residents of these 3 cities voted for Trump, or even usually vote for Republicans and the steamroller that some imagine fades away. Add as many cities as you'd like, DC is only 0.6 million, Philly is 1.5 million, Boston and Detroit are 0.7 million each, and San Francisco is 0.8 million. That's only another 4.3 million, which only edges the voting population up to 6%.

There are other arguments against the Electoral College, but the argument that the big cities will decide the president under a popular vote system is not based on fact, or math.