Trump would have had an easy advantage however."Climate change and other issues have taken our attention away from that threat but it's always been there and it's coming back," James told AFP in Venice.
This would be sufficient to wipe out the current lead Hillary Clinton has in the popular vote, simply by blunting the margin difference between elections (seen in map below). What if the original rules were the popular vote, then what likely changes would have happened among these two tough contenders? What if Donald Trump spent less time in the 6 states noted above, and instead campaigned harder in states such as California (he never did), and Texas (only one appearance). So this is just another example of unwise campaign strategy. Hillary Clinton wasted nearly 7% of her campaigning in two blue states, only to increase her popular vote margin by a total of 1m! But for no good reason as the popular vote margin % was already in the low-20s% in her favor. Yet even in for Ohio’s growing population, her total votes fell ruinously, and her popular vote margin was even more disastrous: from (Obama +3%), to (Clinton -8.1%). As a portion of all of her appearances, her relative efforts were competitive in five of these 6 states and very strong in Ohio. She campaigned with less appearances in each of these 6 states. We also know that there were 6 economically worse-off states that flipped from Obama in 2012 to Trump in 2016. But she did appear from time to time at some music concerts, confidently assuming that was enough (it wasn’t and outside of millennials, she lost the popular vote in the rest of the age spectrum). Hillary Clinton simply went to 2/3 as many appearances, and each time to smaller audiences, versus her rival. Trump’s campaign manager, more than a couple months prior to election, we have a record of all the major campaign appearances for both candidates in order to see who took advantage of the vote decision-making time better.
We have been hearing Donald Trump’s side claim that he was simply more ingenious in picking the “key” states to campaign in, and if the traditional rules were to win the popular vote then he would have changed his overall strategy to win that way. Why not it was game over after that Access Hollywood gift, and it’s time to plan expensive fireworks over the Hudson River on election night. When asked at the 2nd presidential debate whether the election outcome would be accepted, it was Clinton to had to call Trump’s response “horrifying” and a “taking down of our democracy”. No one complained in early October about the Electoral College rules, no one complained that Russian President Putin was hacking our election system, no one complained that the results would be illegitimate if too many Whites versus Blacks come out to vote, and no one complained that Americans were going to have a negative view of Hillary’s e-mails (from servers, to leaks). Salil Mehta at Statistical Ideas explores that question in Popular Vote Besotted. Had the rules been different, Trump would have campaigned differently.
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