In days following the election, many Hillary Clinton supporters often defended their loss by touting the fact that they won the national popular vote. This claim has also been used to claim that Hillary Clinton should become the next President because more people wanted her President. Besides the fact that legally, winning the popular vote means nothing; this notion is not a strong claim as to why Hillary Clinton should have actually become President.
In understanding why Clinton winning the popular vote doesn’t matter, it’s important to understand some of the basis of the Electoral College. One of the reasons the Electoral College was set up was to stop urban areas and large cities from gaining too much control over the election process. At the time of the writing of the Constitution, the large city of Philadelphia could have completely decided the elections. Technically speaking, this means that a candidate that only cared about Philadelphia and the issues that faced the city could have been President of the entire United States without actually caring about the problems of the entire country.
This still stands today and is also one of the main reasons why Clinton was able to win the popular vote. Large Democratic cities push the popular vote in favor of the Democrats. This is especially true is “super blue” states like California and New York. It’s known that they are going to go blue every year, but all they do is make the popular vote for the Democratic candidate go higher and higher. The Republicans have no comparable state. Texas could have been similar, but the margins are getting closer every year so this is no longer the case.
The notion that Hillary Clinton should be President solely because she won the popular vote is not a strong claim. The Electoral College is the law of the land and it should be recognized.
