A majority of the voters voted for Mrs. Clinton. I think (hope?) this fiasco shines a very bright light on the Electoral College, which as I understand it was included in the election process precisely to stop such buffoonery - a way for a small elite to pick whomever they want to pick, ignoring the wishes of the voters. Irony at its finest.
I think that's shining a light in the wrong place.
Hillary Clinton's vote share was the lowest popular vote share since her husband in 1992, when a third-party candidate took almost 19% of the vote. Her margin of victory in the popular vote was the smallest share since Gore's in 2000. I'd have a hard time keeping a straight face saying 46.2% is "a small elite", but 48.3% is "the wishes of the voters". The thing to shine a light on here is not the electoral college, which really only makes a difference, sometimes, in very close races; the question that should be asked is why this wasn't a blowout in the style of Reagan in 1984, Nixon in 1972, or Johnson in 1964 (the last having decisively defeated Hillary Clinton's preferred candidate, Goldwater).
Have a good hard look at the candidate the Republicans ran. Listen to him talk. The Democratic candidate was barely able to eke out a 2% popular vote victory over
that. If the election were decided by popular vote share, then
perhaps the Democratic candidate would have won. (We don't really know for sure, because the candidates would have campaigned differently, and the voter turnout patterns would have been different.) But if the Democrats hadn't run an embarrassingly inept campaign, this would have been an historic blowout, and it wouldn't matter how the votes were counted. If you barely manage to beat Donald Trump by 2%, and think the problem is the electoral college, I'm going to have to disagree.
A lot of people voted for Donald Trump. A minority, to be sure, but still a lot. The reason the Republicans in congress are being so cowardly about challenging a president most of them despise nearly as much as the Democrats do, is because they're afraid of that 46.2%. If his vote share were a "small elite", Donald Trump would be even more of a laughing stock than he already is - the Republicans would defy him brazenly, whenever they felt like it, without worrying about the consequences. But they're absolutely petrified of his voters, precisely because there are a lot of them. Almost as many as Clinton's voters.
I think instead of worrying about small stuff like the electoral college, the Dems ought to be thinking about why they failed so spectacularly to connect with so many voters who instead chose - again, look at him, words fail me at this point. An historical feat of incompetence - Trump took states that Republicans hadn't won for decades. In my opinion, where she failed is in connecting convincingly with voters' sense of greed. Few (including Donald Trump) can match her track record in killing foreigners, and Americans love that. She's pretty good at spouting idiotic self-serving nationalistic bluster, but probably Trump has a slight edge on that one. But, she really fails to connect with a lot of blue-collar voters' sense of greed. Many of these people are outraged - they are in the top quartile of the global income distribution and are angry and bitter that they aren't even higher, despite having no obvious skills that the other three-fourths of the world don't have. Many of them are unable to live the same lifestyles as their parents or grandparents, and feel that they should be part of an hereditary aristocracy that should have guaranteed spots close to the top of the economic pyramid - Chinese workers with identical skills are not part of this aristocracy, and should go get stuffed. Clinton's record as a somewhat inconsistent free-trader probably hurt her on this count, but probably more than that, she was just viewed as part of an establishment that hasn't done much to satisfy blue-collar greed for decades. She went up against an insurgent candidate who promised rainbows and unicorns for everyone, and who replaced the subtle, hidden sort of racism more typical of Democratic protectionists with completely open, unapologetic racism. The "deplorables" decided he was even more deplorable than she was.
Clinton must have done pretty well appealing to American voters' bloodlust and hatred of foreigners, and somewhat less well appealing to their sense of self-righteousness. But many of those whose greed and sense of entitlement has been disappointed, for decades now, did not see much merit in her. Barack Obama was a master at this - nearly all the economic gains during Mr. Hope and Change's administration went to the people at the very, very top of the US economic pyramid, but few since Bill Clinton have exuded fake "I feel your pain" empathy as well as he did. Which is apparently all you need in the US - just appeal to people's sense of greed, whether or not you are subsequently able to deliver. Hillary Clinton absolutely sucked at that. She did not "feel your pain".
