The left has almost no political power. It is also the popular majority. There are more registered democrats in the us than republicans. Clinton is likely to win the popular vote. The system is physically designed, by districting and the electoral college, to support the political minority. You are conflating the actual demographics with the electoral system, which is lending more power to an oppressive point of view that is precisely what the political elite cultivates.
Just because he's leading in the popular vote now doesn't mean he won the popular vote. The New York Times projects that Clinton will win the popular vote once all the ballots have been counted.
Right now it's projecting a margin of 0.7% It's pretty hard to call that a mandate from a clear majority. I think we've got to accept that what we have is a deeply divided country, not a highly vocal minority.
There are many people such as myself in places like NY or California that don't vote because we know our votes don't matter, so it may be that in a popular vote election we'd see a greater margin for Clinton.
I wonder what it would look like if you took the percentages that voted for each candidate and scaled it to the population of the state, and then used that to total the scaled popular vote?
Of course, there's many problems with that, foremost being that you can't assume that those that didn't vote did so in the same relative percentages of support that those that did vote. For example, I imagine there's a higher percentage of Democrats/Clinton supporters in CA and NY that didn't vote compared to the alternatives, and the opposite is likely true of predominantly red states.
When will people learn that polls and "projections" from mainstream media etc are ridiculously wrong on this.
They were wrong on Brexit. They were wrong on Trump. Maybe once more countries have results like this the polsters and media will start actually engaging with real people.
I don't mean to sound offensive but you do understand how the US election system works, right?
It is possible to win the popular vote but lose the election. I don't think anyone is spinning the fact she won the popular vote to mean she should've won.
The President is elected by the electoral college who aren't directed by popular vote but by electorates.
Given current tallies, Trump will probably lose the popular vote by over a million. And he won't break 300 in the Electoral College. This is a very, very narrow win.
This is the third-closest result in the electoral college since 1960 (first that included AK and HI). The next two were G. W. Bush's two wins. It's the second-tightest in the popular vote since then (the results I see have Clinton ahead by about 200K; JFK beat Nixon by ~100K).
Our most recent president, Obama, absolutely destroyed Trump's results as far as having a "mandate", if that's what winning is considered. He got twice as many electoral votes as McCain and a margin of 7% in the popular. The win over Romney was tighter but still in a different order than this election.
Reagan got a mandate in 1984. The talk of "mandate" this year is utter, complete, uncontestable political horse puckey.
