History in the making. Hillary Clinton officially has more votes than any losing presidential candidate, with a margin of nearly 3 million votes more than her opponent, President-elect Donald Trump.
According to the independent, non-partisan Cook Political Report, the Democratic presidential hopeful had a final tally of 65,844,610, while Trump had 62,979,636. The difference in their total vote count is 2,864,974. Clinton’s final tally surpasses even President Barack Obama’s 2012 total by 389,944 votes; Obama defeated then-opponent Mitt Romney by locking in several key swing states, earning him 100 more electoral votes.
What this means is that though Trump won the electoral college — a system that awards each state a certain number of votes based on the number of its Congressional delegation — Clinton wiped out her competition in popular votes, and by a significant margin.
Historically, only two other defeated presidential candidates had higher margins of votes while still losing the election: In 1824, Andrew Jackson won by more than 10 percent, but was denied the presidency. In 1876, Samuel Tilden received 3 percent more votes than his opponent, Rutherford B. Hayes, but he lost the presidency by one electoral vote. Clinton’s popular vote win margin is 2.1 percent, by comparison.
Despite locking in the electoral college more than six weeks ago, Trump, 70, took to Twitter on Wednesday, December 21, to boast that he would have also taken the popular vote too if he wanted to.
“Campaigning to win the Electoral College is much more difficult & sophisticated than the popular vote,” the real estate mogul tweeted. “Hillary focused on the wrong states! I would have done even better in the election, if that is possible, if the winner was based on popular vote – but would campaign differently.”
In late November, the former Apprentice host expressed similar sentiments while accusing Clinton of obtaining millions of “illegal” votes. “In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally,” he tweeted on Sunday, November 27, without providing any factual evidence to bolster his claims.
Clinton has yet to publicly respond to the popular vote results.
