11-28-16
War Is Peace. Freedom Is Slavery. Trump Won In A Landslide.
Breaking Newstags: election 2016, Trump
Donald Trump’s campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway — perhaps seeking to push back on the increasing attention to Hillary Clinton’s widening lead in the national popular vote — has been touting her boss’s margin of victory in the Electoral College. With Trump officially declared the winner in Michigan on Monday, he’s got 306 electoral votes — 56.9 percent of the available total of 538 and nothing to sneeze at. That’s more than George W. Bush got in either of his Electoral College victories, making it the highest total for a Republican since 1988.
But in a historical context, Trump’s Electoral College performance is decidedly below-average. So it’s a bit Orwellian to call it a “landslide” or a “blowout.” There have been 54 presidential elections since the ratification of the 12th Amendment in 1804. (Before that, presidential electors cast two votes each, making it hard to compare them to present-day elections.) Of those 54 cases, Trump’s share of the electoral vote — assuming there are no faithless electors or results overturned by recounts — ranks 44th.
comments powered by Disqus
News
- New findings from Penn Slavery Project show how U. benefitted financially from enslaved labor
- Is it anti-Semitic for President Trump to call Chuck Todd ‘sleepy eyes’?
- Human Evolution: Walking Upright Evolved at Least 3.6 Million Years Ago—Long Before Modern Humans Appeared
- Why a primary challenge to Trump is likely to fail
- Smog and Disasters Spurred the Laws Trump Wants to Undo
- Feds charge controversial Kent State University professor Julio Pino with lying to FBI
- New Yorker publishes profile of H.R. McMaster just weeks after Trump fires him
- Dartmouth historian Matthew J. Garcia says conservative partisans in Arizona have taken over a civics school he once ran
- Berkeley’s Carolyn Merchant explains what ecofeminism is
- University of Southern California's David Kang says Korea is the only place on earth where the Cold War continues