Michigan officially moved into Trump’s win column Monday, giving him the state’s 16 electoral votes and bringing his Electoral College total to 306 to Clinton’s 232. And yet Clinton continues to trounce Trump in the popular vote. The Democratic candidate’s lead has surpassed 2.5 million this week, giving her about a 2 percentage point edge.
Clinton has, so far, secured 65,152,310 votes to Trump’s 62,626,216 — the greatest popular-vote victory for a presidential loser since 1876 (which was one of, if not the most, controversial elections in U.S. history). For a more contemporary example than Samuel Tilden, Al Gore won the popular vote to George W. Bush in 2000 by about 540,000 votes.
The rise in her popular-vote numbers appear to be coming from the coasts — absentee-ballots counts from places such as California and New York. But Trump would answer that he’d have gotten more votes if he’d campaigned in those places. And, of course, no one has yet deducted the those imaginary “millions of people who voted illegally.”
*This piece incorrectly stated that Gore lost the popular vote. The error has been corrected.
