Bear in mind that the President of the United States is not directly elected by a popular vote. The mathematics of who gets the largest voice are distorted, intentionally so by the Framers. They did not want low-population agrarian states to be permanently in effect disenfranchised.

It is ironic after all of these decades of originalism being seen as a reactionary thing against minorities that the Framers put positive discrimination for (economic and geographic) minorities into the Constitution explicitly to prevent "tyranny of the majority".

The U.S.A. is full of such ironies at the moment.

> explicitly to prevent "tyranny of the majority"

Yep, as if tyranny of the minority is better. Of course Republicans think it's good because it gets them elected but this country is regressing because of the status quo.

When the framers were setting out their ideas the rural states had large populations. However the framers declared great swathes of them to be worth 60% of others.

A lot of these 2% live in states whose influence on the outcome of the presidential election is disproportionately high due to the electoral system. So you have a high influence of farmers on states that have a high influence on the election outcome and those 2% end up looking more like 4% in terms of practical influence.

It is disingenuous to lay the results at their feet only like the comment you're responding to suggests ; Trump did win the popular vote. The dems fumbled this one, plain and simple.

You're correct that this election was more lost by the Democrats than won by the Republicans, but Trump didn't actually get the popular vote. That meme took off well before the final vote count was completed.

It was close, and American politics being what it is, it doesn't actually matter. Hillary Clinton did get a majority in 2016 after all, but the narrative was still that she was the worst and losing-est candidate in American political history. Every Democrat is a liar, a cheat and a communist, every Republican has a mandate from God to sweep the leftists into the sea. That's just how it works, regardless of what the numbers say.

> You're correct that this election was more lost by the Democrats than won by the Republicans, but Trump didn't actually get the popular vote.

What do you mean? In 2024, Trump indisputably won the popular vote - as in, he had more total popular votes than any other candidate (77.3 million votes compared to 75 million votes to Kamala, and nowhere remotely close for anyone else), which is what "winning a vote" means. In 2016 you're right that Hillary won the popular vote but still lost the presidency, but that's a different matter. And you're also right that he could have lost the popular vote again and still won the presidency, but that's irrelevant to the question of whether he did win or not.

Huh?

Trump won 49% of the vote in 2024, compared to Hillary's 48% in 2016.

The numbers go with the story perfectly. He didn't win a majority of the popular vote, but neither did Hilary. Trump did win a bigger share than she did though.

You're confusing the popular vote with electoral votes.

Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in 2016 by a margin of almost 3 million[0].

But because states vote for President in the US through the electoral college, rather than people, Trump won the election with a slight majority of electoral votes. Hillary Clinton lost not because she was unpopular (she was, even in the most conservative estimate, about as popular as Trump,) but because she didn't campaign in the correct states.

[0]https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/hillary-clinton-officially-w...

They're not confusing popular and electoral votes. Trump won a majority of electoral votes, and a plurality of the popular vote, as they claimed; that is from the official count, not preliminary counts. He did not win a majority of the popular vote, but that is also the case both for Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton (twice, though one of those was a rare three candidate race where a majority would have been unlikely).

You cannot say that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in 2016 and say that Trump did not in 2024 unless you are disputing the official count. He had a margin of around 2.3m.

https://www.fec.gov/resources/cms-content/documents/2024pres...

No one claimed he won the majority of the vote though. The claim was just that he "won the popular vote" (this time, in 2024, not in previous elections). And winning a plurality is winning the vote, in almost all electoral systems (of course, the popular vote is ultimately meaningless in the USA, but that doesn't mean we should apply some other arbitrary threshold for what it means to win it).

We're in agreement on that point. I'm just trying to understand the rationale of the commenter who seems to be claiming that Clinton won the popular vote in 2016 and Trump lost the popular vote in 2024. Setting a threshold of a majority would at least be consistent, but I don't see any way to hold both of those positions while accepting the results as correct.

>And winning a plurality is winning the vote, in almost all electoral systems

I'd argue that there are many electoral systems that realize the potential problems this causes, and either use runoffs, or IRV/STV, to avoid it. The US (and UK...) just have very antiquated electoral processes that, especially in the US, have not benefited from the last two centuries of research on voting systems.

Clinton did win the popular vote in 2016. That much has been well documented and well established.

I was incorrect about Trump not winning the popular vote. I thought that the final vote tally had him losing by a slight margin but apparently not, so mea culpa on that.

> And winning a plurality is winning the vote, in almost all electoral systems

Presidential systems with runoffs are very popular. A plurality is useless there, you win with a majority.

Even then, both the candidate who wins the plurality and the runner-up make it to the next step of the election, so in some sense they (both) still won the (first step) of the election. Regardless, the USA has no such runoffs at any level in the electoral process, so it doesn't seem like this standard should be applied here.