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.