In their never-ending attempt to try and explain how they blew the presidential election, Democrats are left arguing that the government federal is illegitimate because they won a majority of the votes. As Shift has already highlighted, the liberal argument about Hillary Clinton winning the national vote is built on a false premise, since her entire victory margin comes from a state (California ) that electoral college politics dictated Donald Trump would not campaign in.
Of course, had the electoral college rules been different, the campaigns would have been different.
Recently, Democrats have been trying the same argument about U.S. Senate races, saying that Republicans didn’t really earn a mandate to govern because Democrats won more Senate-race votes across the country. As the Washington Post points out, that is the “most bogus stat of the 2016 election: How Democrats won the Senate popular vote.”
The reality is that, again because California (and thanks to it sharing Washington’s Top-Two primary system) had two Democrats on the general ballot for the U.S. Senate. As the Post points out, “In a normal Democrat-versus-Republican election in California, the Democrat might have gotten 7 million votes and the Republican 4.6 million votes — a margin of 2.4 million votes. In this case, the margin was 11.6 million, a 9-million-or-so vote swing, which basically accounts for Democrats’ entire advantage in the nationwide Senate popular vote.”
Further, in pointing out a basic element of civics to the liberals, the Post wrote “another factor in all of this: Only about two-thirds of the country holds Senate races in any given election, meaning that the lean of the popular vote is very reliant upon which states are up that particular cycle. This year, the two biggest, bluest states in the country — California and New York — both happened to be up. The biggest GOP-leaning state, Texas, was not.”
Certainly we at Shift understand why the Democrats are trying to spin their way out of a bad election – though when the Washington Post is the paper pointing out the liberals are essentially lying, you know it was a really bad election.
