I think you misinterpreted what he was suggesting - it is meaningless to say that Hillary won the popular vote because neither party were trying to win the popular vote - you win the presidency by winning the electoral college.

If instead the president was chosen by popular vote, both parties likely would have campaigned differently.

>I think you misinterpreted what he was suggesting - it is meaningless to say that Hillary won the popular vote because neither party were trying to win the popular vote - you win the presidency by winning the electoral college.

This is a non-sequitur. Whether or not that metric (popular vote) has a bearing on the results of presidential election is irrelevant to the statement of whether he won in that metric.

Furthermore, it's counter-productive to the discussion to preface a comment with a politically charged comment (trump and some of his supporters legitimately believes he got more popular vote than clinton, despite evidence to the contrary), then backpedal on that statement by adding a bunch of qualifiers.

You don't win a metric.

Maybe with a definition that you can only "win" a competition that was agreed upon ahead of time. However, a quick search on hn shows that "win" colloquially also can mean beating everyone else at some metric (or in some cases, on a subjective basis). eg.

"Chrome won" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14420972, despite the lack of an actual competition for internet browser market share

"Linux and open source have won, get over it" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23673867

"Teenage Engineering has won over kids and professionals with a synthesizer" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20527069

They key part seems to be:

> There is no contest for the popular vote.

And that since the rules weren’t “whoever wins the national popular vote is president” we can’t know how campaigns and voters would have behaved under that rule set, making appeals to the “popular vote” meaningless. A position which I actually agree with, despite very much not liking the last couple R presidents who won despite “losing” the (meaningless, and not a useful measure of much given the above) popular vote.

It’s fun to complain about when your (our, perhaps) person loses but is about as meaningful as “our team should have won because we had more men-on-base”. Well, OK, but baseball is played to optimize for runs because that’s how you win, so no, you shouldn’t have won, and also if the other team had been optimizing for men-on-base you may still have lost—we simply can’t know.