Here’s a list of the top ten popular vote winners in U.S. presidential history (by thousands of votes):
Update [2016-11-10 13:19:58 by BooMan]: I accidentally forgot to include Mitt Romney, so this is now a Top 11 list and the rest of the post is amended to reflect my error.
- 1. 2008- Barack Obama- 69,499
2. 2012- Barack Obama- 65,916
3. 2004- George W. Bush- 62,041
4. 2012- Mitt Romney- 60,934
5. 2008- John McCain- 59,948
6. 2016- Hillary Clinton- 59,938
7. 2016- Donald Trump- 59,705
8. 2004- John Kerry- 59,028
9. 1984- Ronald Reagan- 54,455
10. 2000- Al Gore- 51,000
11. 2000- George W. Bush- 50,456
A few notes: If she hasn’t already, Clinton will eventually pass John McCain and be in fifth place on this list. Obviously, the list is biased in favor of participants in the most recent elections since population growth has been constant. That’s why the ten out of eleven are from the last four presidential elections.
Still, Al Gore is listed higher than his 2000 opponent and Donald Trump is listed higher than his 2016 opponent. Coming in in seventh place is even less impressive for Trump when you realize that he ran in the election with the largest population. He got fewer votes than John McCain did eight years ago in an election where McCain only pulled a little over forty-five percent. He barely got more votes than John Kerry did twelve years ago in a losing effort.
In the end, Clinton will receive more votes than anyone except Barack Obama, George W. Bush in 2004, and Mitt Romney in 2008, and yet she won’t become president. Donald Trump will be behind not only his opponent but John McCain and Sarah Palin.
In most ways, none of this matters. Candidates don’t vie to win the popular vote. If they did, they would campaign in different states and their ads would be different and placed in different media markets. They’d possibly pick different running mates and adopt modified policies. They run to win the Electoral College, and that is how they should be judged. They also don’t run against candidates from prior or future elections. A win is a win.
But, as we begin to look at just how consequential this election will be, it’s important to have some perspective about how much support there is for the changes that are coming. Consider this:
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who chaired Trump’s campaign in Texas, said the businessman’s victory allows state Republicans to “move forward with boldness and confidence,” finally free to push conservative legislation without having to worry about Washington undermining it.
“The fact we’re going to have a rock-solid conservative on the Supreme Court, and maybe two or three more before his term ends, and the fact that we’re not going to have the EPA on our back, the Justice Department on our back, all the money and the energy and the time that we spent suing the federal government, Abbott and Paxton — that’s all gone,” Patrick said in an interview with The Texas Tribune.
“And so that allows us to say, ‘You know what? We’re willing to make the — whatever it takes to fight to get the votes to pass solid conservative legislation, and we’re going to have a White House that supports it, a Justice Department that supports it.’”
One example? Voter ID. Texas lawmakers are under a court order to fix the state’s tough voter ID law when they meet again in January in Austin. The likelihood that the fix is “not going to be overturned by the Justice Department or the White House is in itself so freeing,” Patrick said, calling it a “brand new day for legislators” not just in Texas but across the country.
In a sign of both strength and weakness, Clinton actually ran stronger in Texas (43%) than she did in Iowa (42%), and almost as strong as she did in Ohio (44%). But more than that, fewer people voted for his vague platform than voted against it. What percentage voted for Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick’s vision of widespread minority disenfranchisement and an absolutely gutted Environmental Protection Agency at a time of critical climate change?
The freedom Trump and the Republicans have to make radical sweeping and (often) unpopular changes to our country is way out of proportion to what the voters said.
Now, that’s going to create a backlash, no doubt, but it should also be a least a small source of strength for those who are intent on resisting these changes in Congress and in state legislatures.
It would be interesting to weight those numbers relative to the changing US population. Not sure how meaningful they are without that weighting. I have a feeling that if you did that weighting you’d find that Reagan in 1984 would be in the top position.
Yes, it’s like my pet peeve as a movie lover, showing box office records in terms of ticket sales $$ with no accounting for inflation. What did a movie ticket cost in 1980, what does it cost now? Math is hard.
Sorry for the snark, it as unnecessary.
I doubt the electoral college process of electing a President and the two senators per state rule will ever be reformed unless large states like California which are disadvantaged by it threaten to secede, and even then they might actually have to follow through on that threat for any meaningful change to happen. In fact if all remaining blue states seceded you would have two countries, one third world and one of the most advanced economies and democracies in the world. Now there’s an idea!
As I feared from the moment Tim Kaine went to DNC, replacing Dean (despite being a hired gun now then he was doing what was needed), our down ballot is literally in ruins and we must strengthen the bench and the states. Strength in the states for Dems was a key factor but since Citizens United it has withered away. There is zero we can do about CU but we have to try in the states.
http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/11/10/13576488/democratic-party-smoking-pile-rubble
Also Ruy Teixeira needs to have his keyboard taken away since his emerging Democratic majority shit has bamboozled the national leaders into complacency at best.
Interesting link. You’ve probably already seen this: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/09/donald-trump-white-house-hillary-clinton-liber
als
Not that particular one but I have always been a supporter of Thomas Frank. As for the other, I had hoped the Democratic primary voters and elites had learned from Kerry, Obama, McCain (his turn), Romney (electable). When you choose the person because you think they can win, you lose. When you choose the person who you think SHOULD win you only might lose.
While there were enthusiastic HRC supporters a significant number supported and worked for her because electable. Maybe Bernie would not have won either, but the elites shouldn’t have cleared the field for her in 2015. So now we have her legacy of failing at the supreme moment and an Obama presidency. The GOP base succeeded because their elites have no credibility with them despite electoral victories, ours despite having led us into constant losses have all the credibility in the world.
I read that Dean wants his old job back. But he infested us with Blue Dogs that monkeywrenched legislation for corporate rentals everywhere they could. Not to mention Stupak. Wonder if he is Chuck’s minion?
Nice try but a fallacious argument. Sort like saying X is higher income than his/her mother/father were by using X’s 2015 actual dollar income and mother/father actual dollar income in 1984.
A complete and legitimate comparison of actual votes in a current election to that of a prior election requires adjusting for the size of the EVs (eligible voters) as of the election date, the turnout rate, 3rd party vote, etc. Making those adjustments, Clinton’s 60 million votes is less than Kerry’s 59 million votes and Trump’s 59 million votes is less than McCain’s 59 million.
But the reality in every presidential election is turning out enough voters in enough of the right states to win. Clinton didn’t and Trump did.
There’s nothing fallacious about how I presented this data.
if by that you mean the numbers are correct, ok.
i agree with marie and joeldanwalls in questioning whether vote numbers not adjusted to population mean very much. It’s like comparing dollar prices without mentioning inflation.
No, I mean that Trump got fewer votes than several candidates who ran with a smaller eligible pool vote.
So did Clinton. And John Kerry got eight million more votes than Gore did four years earlier, but so, what?
John Kerry and Al Gore never became president.
But I think it’s important to realize that Trump got fewer votes than Romney and McCain despite having more voters available to convince. It puts the size of his support is some perspective.
Latest stats show Clinton is already at 60.1 million. I bet she passes Romney when all of the CA votes are counted.
Also, you write that “Donald Trump is listed higher than his 2016 opponent,” which is wrong. He is below Hillary Clinton.
Hillary now at 60.21. Romney’s total in her sights.
But fuck, what happened to those extra Obama voters? Curious to see why 4 million Dem voters stayed home given what was at stake.
Thought experiment – what if you held a do-over tomorrow? How many people thought she was going to win anyway and stayed home? I think you’d get another 5 million votes.
Some stayed home. Some voted for Trump.
Any presentation that doesn’t compare apples to apples is fallacious. Is also somewhat meaningless in it’s implication which is that Clinton was a better candidate than Kerry and once all the numbers are in will surpass McCain’s vote total.
Was Obama the top vote getter ever bc he was the best candidate ever in 2008? Or was that a reflection of how horrible Palin was as the GOP VP nominee? Or a referendum on how horrible Bush/Cheney had been?
A third term for a party in office is a high hurdle. In the past 108 years has only been achieved four times:
Taft 1908 (the end of GOP presidential dominance since 1860)
Hoover 1928
Truman 1948 (after four terms but he was the incumbent)
GHWB 1988
Two pre-existing waves exist in presidential elections. 1) the policies and personality of the incumbent as known and viewed by the public and 2) outcome of the last midterm election. The rest is up to the candidate and how she/he manages those waves, advances her/his own policies and public persona, and the good or bad luck as who she/he draws as an opponent.
Demonizing Dukakis was the only card GHWB had to play. Truman directly confronted #2. Hoover rode #2 and differentiated himself from silent Cal. Taft rode #1.
It’s really not complicated.
John McCain had twelve apples and built a structure five apples high.
Donald Trump had 16 apples and built a structure four and half apples high.
Is that apples to apples enough for you?
Something worth reading and weighing…
Long before election night, Trump’s data operatives, in particular those contracted from Cambridge Analytica, understood that his voters were different. And to better understand how they differed from Ryan-style Republicans, they set off to study them.
The firm called these Trump supporters “disenfranchised new Republicans”: younger than traditional party loyalists and less likely to live in metropolitan areas. They share Bannon’s populist spirit and care more than other Republicans about three big issues: law and order, immigration, and wages.
They also harbored a deep contempt for the reigning political establishment in both parties, along with a desire to return the country to happier times. Trump was the key that fit in this lock. “Trump is fundamentally a populist,” says Bannon. “He’s the leader of a populist uprising. But he’s also an enormously successful entrepreneur who succeeded in real estate, media, and branding.” The voters who elected Trump, he says, wish to partake in this story of American success but not destroy the American system of government. “This is not the French Revolution,” says Bannon. “They destroyed the basic institutions of their society and changed their form of government. What Trump represents is a restoration–a restoration of true American capitalism and a revolution against state-sponsored socialism. Elites have taken all the upside for themselves and pushed the downside to the working- and middle-class Americans.”
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-10/trump-s-data-team-saw-a-different-america-and-they
-were-right
Trump blew up both parties. It remains to be seen how he will co-opt the Republican elites.
(Cannot comprehend Trump winning 53% of women voters…)
This seems to be a repackaging of the old story with a twist. Work hard and you can have millions just like me. We just need to fix a few things here and there. And it it doesn’t work, rinse and repeat. Stay with me until we get it all restored.
Speaking of which, the old maestro, Alan Greenspan, now feels freed and so he announced how he would love to see Dodd-Frank repealed. Of course. I would expect nothing more if we are going to Make America Great Again.
Yeah and complete with speeding up the rate of income/wealth inequality and setting the stage for another financial meltdown.
I quite sure they want to get it going again. Already they are looking to raise interest rates.
How is raising interest rates a bad thing? Undoes many perverse incentives.
Moar honey for the banks. Smack down the job market putting pressure on wages
WIN! WIN!
I think you may have it backwards; raising interest rates is the way out of this mess.
Agree. Repackaging after the election results are known to say nothing new other than that the winning team was very astute and savvy.
Where are you getting that from? The exit polls I have seen indicate that Hillary won the female vote 54-42 (the remaining 4 includes those declining to answer).
As an aside, the gender gap is often misunderstood. The gender gap is primarily for single females and the gap is much smaller between married women and men, sometimes vanishing entirely. This time was obviously different, with married women voting similar to single men (essentially tied but slightly for Hillary), married men going big for Trump, and single women big for Hillary.
I think that was the number for white women?
Dunno. Just photos of the candidates with % of women voters as descriptor. I haven’t seen any exit poll summaries, have you?
Exit polling
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/clinton-couldnt-win-over-white-women/
It’s the header for that Bloomberg link.
This is a stunning and unnecessary failure for the Left. We are the party of populists and we let this happen. Shameful and predictable.
Do you want a vanguard party, and routinely lose presidential elections?
Or a mass party, and routinely win them — and lose them, when it happens at all, by the equivalent of the a couple dozen NFL Sunday stadium-fulls?
Of course we want a mass party. Hence the idea of ‘populism’. A word I cringe to hear uttered in the same bite with ‘Trump’ all the time now.
Davis, we let them get to our left. For the Democratic Party this has to be awarded a grade of ‘F’. How did we get talked out of that, hmmm… Davis?
If one wants to operate the Democratic Party as an incrementalist, globalist chopping-shop go right ahead and try, but you still can’t let them get to your left. Bernie clearly demonstrated this, to howls, I might add, of disdain. It is a baked in reality of our two-party politics. We broke our sword.
No, the voters are not to our left. Feingold fell short of Clinton in Wisconsin. The exact numbers aren’t in yet, but it’s virtually certain Teachout fell short of Clinton in NY-19 (14 points back in a district 10 points back). Single-payer was utterly crushed in Colorado by a margin of four to one (!!!). Somewhat leftier positions might help on particular issues but a general leftward move will lead to even worse defeats.
Did you ever stop to think that maybe Clinton was a drag on their candidacies? In fact, top of the ticket vote is a pretty good indicator of bottom of ticket in almost every senate race.
If she was a drag on their candidacy’s they would be performing as well or a little bit better than her. They didn’t.
I’m talking about income equality stuff; money. Not identity or cultural politics. I think we have to play defence there and get back to our roots; the pay packet.
Income inequality? You mean like Teachout?
She’s there. She did that. It didn’t help. It hurt.
Not objecting to her at all – I supported and even donated to her. But we have to face the fact that shifting to a more left position than Hillary’s (already pretty left) platform will cost us votes, not gain them.
As I mentioned elsewhere I am talking about little practical things that help people in discernible ways. Pay-day loan reform, minimum wage, ban on civil forfeiture to non-federal agencies, mortgage reform. We made a hash of all of this. Got on the wrong side of it; became mealy-mouthed.
We need to help her in some simple, meaningful, memorable way.
I don’t necessarily believe that. I don’t think it’s that simple. A lot of what Teachout was running on is actually a key part of success, whether you want to call it “far left” or not.
She wasn’t running in an easy district, you know, especially as an outsider to the community.
I think with Clinton, she hit her benchmarks for turnout in her key states in her key cities, and it wasn’t enough, shockingly, because she vastly underperformed (or Trump vastly overperformed) in rural areas. This was no easy thing to navigate. The GOP racialized the contest to win it in just this way, and her response needed to be (apparently) to hope the urban base would stick with her and go into rural Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and campaign like hell on fixing their communities. But, of course, this would have appeared to be pandering to the racists and it just would not have been easy to pull off on any level. If her numbers had looked bad, she might have tried it, but her numbers looked fine, so she didn’t risk it.
I don’t think it’s all that complicated. Sanders would have had a different shaped electorate. He would have likely lost my county in the Philly suburbs that Clinton won by 35,000 votes, but he probably would have taken less of a beating in the sticks. That type of stuff is hypothetical. Basically, the GOP successfully racially polarized the north to win. End of story.
Teachout’s district isn’t “hard”. It’s D+1 – easy side of tossup. But the point isn’t that Teachout lost, it’s that she probably did worse than Clinton did in her district – as did Feingold in his.
By way of disclosure, my brother has done some work for Teachout. Exactly what, I’m not certain, but at least some speechwriting.
In any case, between the money she faced and the district, it was not an easy task regardless of previous PVI.
Now, her message inspired that money to go against her, and that’s part of the equation here. If you go up against big business, big business goes up against you. So, we can never ignore that. But, as for appealing to these workers on the merits of her actual argument, I don’t think her argument was a loser.
This is deomstrably untrue:
Had Clinton matched Obama’s margin in Milwaukee and Wayne she would have won Michigan and Wisconsin. This does not appear to be the case with Pennsylvania.
In Florida she did not improve her margins by percentage (FL counties always grow) in Broward, Dade and Palm. She lost at either end of the I-4 corridor where Obama won, but she there she did run well behind Obama in some rural places as well.
So what you’re saying is, Trump would still be President if Clinton had followed your advice and put more ground game in Wisconsin and Michigan even though all the polls and information she had on had told her she really didn’t need to because she was winning by crazy margins without it because she would have still lost Pennsylvania, possibly by larger margins.
What I want to know though is where the fuck was Feingold’s ground game?
I’ve been thinking about this and I think Trump won big with the white working class in large part because he gave them a target. Small stuff is what Democrats have been doing for years.
It’s time for a coherent vision. Break up the big banks. Stop the foreign wars. Demagoguery works. Change the langugage. Change the tone. Stop the Corey Booker nonsense. That stuff doesn’t sell and its lame.
I think you have it backwards on identity politics. You’re uncomfortable with it because you want to win more of the white vote, not less. But the left in the US is not going to win anything if it can’t organize and motivate poor whites and minorities to vote.
That’s why I’ve always thought Trump would have beaten Bernie head to head. Bernie’s the real deal but he would never spit on minorities to gain favor with whites.
Agree with this, question is how? Seem to me income inequality issues affect both and that they exist at all is on us as a party. A greater accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few is what you expect after three decades of Republican administration.
I like your policy prescriptions, by the way.
It’s the same country it was on Monday, one that elected, and re-elected a black president, and would give him a third term if they could (Cf. Bloomberg).
One where a million and a half more actual poll-going voters will turn out to have voted for the woman, and the Democrat, than the alternative.
So let’s change everything.
The point is where those voters are located. A million California votes redistributed around North Carolina and the Rust Belt states, and Hillary would not be president-elect without affecting the California outcome.
sorry, NOW, not NOT. Aargh.
Your brand of narrow, self-serving incrementalism and smarmy indifference to those left behind by globalisation is, as the Aussies say, ‘off’. Why are you even still here? You are the poster-boy for exactly the point of failure of the whole Democratic influence pyramid, now collapsed.
An asylum is useless without keepers.
Yeah, I thought as much…
Gaslighting is the new black, I guess
So I do think it is worth remembering that this election was close as hell.
I remember 1980 and 1984 when we seem a million years from power.
The consequences are disastrous, but the parties performance in historical terms given the closeness of the election and the margin in many of these states hardly suggests a Party in complete dissaray.
This is not to say there are not things to learn and to be mad about.
But I do think some perspective is in order.
Whether that was the point of Davis I have no idea since I lack the intelligence to tell when he is joking.
Look, it’s simply a hell of a lot more fun to run around in circles and read people out of the party.
I’m increasingly convinced you were never in it. There has to be some revisions.
I’m a county and town Democratic Party committee member.
I’ve been a delegate or alternate to every presidential-year state Democratic convention since 1988, and a delegate or alternate to three off-year conventions.
I’m a 30-year member of my trade union, and the DSA, the latter almost since DSOC days.
Yeah, I’m a party member.
I wasn’t asking for your resume, but thanks. It had seemed to me you had already gotten snuggled up to the fire somewhere but that really wasn’t my point.
We let them get to our left, Davis. That’s not just wrong it is clearly disastrous. Argue whatever point of policy or incrementalism you like, we can’t ever let them do this again and we need to do some forensics as to how it happened in that interest; this does not seem optional. It appears we lost 18% of voters with income less than $30k. If so, that is double-plus ungood; not sustainable.
If you’re willing to leave Eugene Debs and Clarence Darrow respectfully in their graves I’m hoping you stick around.
Do we ever intend to win something besides presidencies?
And mayoralties, I guess…
Go look at that map again. It really is stunning.
Just read your interesting diary. Am I correct in assuming that among all voters (?) we lost 1% of whites and 18% of people making under $30k? That’s not ‘close as hell’ if you are looking at the core Democratic cohort; that’s the bottom falling out.
OK folks, time to quit beating up on Booman.
It’s unnecessary to dig into demographic data to realize that Trump’s mandate (whatever the hell that means) as reflected by popular vote is far from Obama’s. I mean, the population of the country has grown by perhaps a couple of percent since 2008, so you can compare 2008 and 2016 data with no weighting correction applied, and you’ll be making very little error. Not that that matters. Dubya had no mandate in these terms either and we all know how restrained he was.
But apropos of the idea of “out of proportion to his mandate”, sorry, but I am reminded of a good friend who looks around at the wreckage and says, but but, but HIllary had all those position papers and Trump’s an ignoramus and stupidity about e-mail investigation and yadda yadda yadda. As I said to my friend, sorry but there’s no referee in a political contest.
The people have spoken. But James Madison stuffed a sock in their megaphone.
Another way of looking at it is that Trump will win the Electoral College in spite of the greatest shortfall in popular votes ever, either absolute or in percentage terms. (John Quincy Adams lost by a larger percentage margin, but that went to the House). He had the weakest support of any president ever. Mandate? Don’t make me laugh.
Certainly this requires blowing up the most successful and progressive Democratic operation of my lifetime.
What part of it has survived the crash, are you thinking? Ideologically it seems like a plane full of holiday-makers chatting and clinking glasses just ploughed into a mountainside due to navigational error.
So there’s that.
Sanders is supporting Keith Ellison for the DNC.
The Iron Law of Institutions comes into play. Bet Dean is Schumer’s idea, behind the scenes.
There seems to be a problem, however.
The requiems are coming in:
Jennifer Burns, Chronicle of Higher Education: What Was Conservatism
Looking around for leadership of the party?
Senator Professor Warren:
Otherwise not much. But it’s a start and it is the seed from which we hopefully rebuild a very rapid comeback. ¡No pasarán! is all we have at the moment. Has happened before. But make no mistake these are our only real leaders now. The Hillary cloud of smug has been blown away revealing us as terribly exposed but with even greater potentials than ever.
Booman, on another subject I would love for you to write an entry on the success of the Reid machine in Nevada this cycle,. He truly ran the table and surely there is something to learn there.
Billboard Hallelujah covers
One more Renee Fleming