Nobody cares about the popular vote. The electoral college incentivizes Republicans to campaign in states that don’t necessarily yield a ton of popular votes, and disincentizes them from campaigning in states like California that have a lot of votes. The President popular vote simply doesn’t reflect what the results would be if people were actually trying to win the popular vote.

Republicans routinely win the House popular vote, where these incentives to go after smaller states don’t exist, and there is an incentive to campaign in the red counties of blue states. Republicans won the House popular vote 8 times since 1992. Democrats won the House popular vote 6 times.

In particular, Republicans won the House popular vote in both 2000 and 2016. Do you think Bush and Trump couldn’t have matched the popular vote share of congressional Republicans if they had an incentive to campaign in every red House district in California?

Folks love to speculate about alternative election systems where we used a direct popular vote. But if we’re imagining a counter-factual scenario with a different election system, why that one? Direct election of the executive is unusual. Nearly every developed country chooses the executive based on who gets the majority in the legislature. Under that system, we would have had even more Republican executives (16 years) and less Democratic executives (12 years) since 1992.