How quickly things change since my last post on the Popular Vote in 2016, Hillary is up by 668,483 votes.
The New York Times estimated on November 12th that there are 7 million uncounted ballots in the Country. The Los Angeles Times reported that California still had not counted 4 million ballots, a number expected to grow. In North Carolina, the day after Election day, there were 26,600 Provisional ballots left to count. In Utah there remained 153,000 uncounted ballots as of the evening after the Election. Maine was still processing 4,500 Absentee ballots after the Election. In Michigan the Secretary of State’s office said the results will now go through a canvassing process. The AP has not yet called Michigan for Trump because of the tight margin.
Michigan and New Hampshire had not yet announced the final vote totals. This represents 20 Electoral Votes.
Hillary Clinton not only won the Popular Vote in Tuesday’s Election. It is now clear that she won it by a margin larger than two candidates who went on to win the Presidency.
David Leonhardt, a Columnist for The New York Times, noted on Friday that with a 1.7 percentage-point Popular Vote lead over Donald Trump, Clinton will have a larger margin of victory than Richard Nixon had over Hubert Humphrey in 1968 or John F. Kennedy had over Nixon in 1960. Her edge is also larger than Al Gore’s Popular Vote victory over George W. Bush in 2000, though he too was stymied by an Electoral College loss.
In raw numbers, that amounts to an edge of roughly 1.8 million votes as of Saturday night.
Votes are still being counted, however, with the outstanding ballots overwhelmingly concentrated in Democratic bastions like California, Washington State, and New York.
The Times’ Nate Cohn estimated on Saturday that there were a total of 7 million votes left to be counted Nationwide. As of Thursday, more than 4 million votes had yet to be counted in California alone.
That means that Clinton’s lead will almost certainly grow in the coming days, as it has since election night.
A larger popular vote lead will not change the Electoral College math and thus the Election’s fundamental outcome.
But it comes as welcome news for progressives eager to cast aspersions on President-Elect Trump’s political mandate, and gives fodder to a nascent campaign to abolish the Electoral College, which has defied the will of the voters twice in the past two decades.
NYC Wins When Everyone Can Vote! Michael H. Drucker
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