Many Americans obviously believe that Donald Trump's presidency is a national calamity.
And maybe it is. But then another calamity might be that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote last November. Because it was from that vote that an increasingly deranged and counterproductive "resistance" to Trump's presidency emerged.
Although anyone as unhinged as Trump occupying an office as powerful as the presidency would have provoked great opposition, the hunch is that that opposition would have emerged later and in less intense, more orthodox form if Trump could have pointed to a popular vote mandate. But he couldn't, and in that fact the left found that silver lining that legitimized its portrayal of Trump as illegitimate.
The ironic aspect of the "Hillary won the popular vote" claim as a basis for resistance to Trump, however, is that it actually isn't true, or at least not true in the way Trump's critics suggest. This is because the popular vote is not just legally irrelevant (which is why Trump sits in the Oval Office instead of Clinton), but also supremely difficult to interpret separate from that "technicality" known as the electoral college.
By providing the context and rules for the campaign, the electoral college determines just about everything, including where the candidates spend their time and money and the nature of their appeals. Without the electoral college, the issues stressed by Clinton and Trump would likely have been different, their campaign commercials would have had different content, and they would possibly have even chosen different running mates.
As noted before, landslide elections like Johnson-Goldwater (1964), Nixon-McGovern (1972) and Reagan-Mondale (1984) produce popular-vote totals that broadly reflect the relative popularity of the contenders, but not so in close races like Trump-Clinton. In such cases, and precisely because the electoral college exists and sets the terms of competition, there is scant means of inferring how a national popular vote would have come out in the electoral college's absence.
So no, Hillary didn't actually "win" the popular vote; nor did Al Gore in 2000, George W. Bush in 2004 or Barack Obama in 2012.
Had there been no electoral college, and thus victory obtainable only through a national vote, Trump would have tried to pad his total by spending lots of time and money in places like California and New York that he had no chance of winning under the electoral college system. But doing so, under the current rules of the game, would almost certainly have also cost him Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan, and thereby the election itself.
Indeed, about the best we can do in trying to predict how a national popular vote would have come out without the electoral college is look at the outcomes in the battleground states where the campaigns were actually conducted.
There were at least 12 states widely recognized as such going into 2016--Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia. One could also perhaps throw in Wisconsin and Minnesota, usually "blue" but thought (correctly, with hindsight) to be potentially in play this time around.
As it turns out, Trump actually won the cumulative vote in those 14 states by approximately 1,575,000 votes.
That Trump beat Clinton in such swing states hardly means he would have won a national popular vote without the electoral college, but it is probably at least as good an indicator as Clinton's popular vote lead in a race where no one was trying to win the popular vote (especially given that her 2.9 million national vote margin was far smaller than her margin in California alone).
As many have noted, to argue that the winner of the popular vote under our current system is the real winner would be analogous to declaring the baseball team that got the most hits the winner of the World Series or the football team that got the most first downs the winner of the Super Bowl.
But the danger in misinterpreting the popular-vote outcome goes beyond simply empowering a radicalized opposition to a legitimate (if admittedly troubling) presidency. For as long as Democrats keep taking solace in that popular vote, they will be discouraged from facing the fact that, apart from Obama's 2102 re-election, virtually everything that could go wrong electorally for their party since 2008 has.
The losses in Congress, governors' mansions and state legislatures have been amply documented, but their ferocious efforts to obstruct Trump have also prevented any genuine soul-searching or introspection in the service of reform. It has simply been assumed, because of Clinton's popular-vote margin, that such efforts are unnecessary and that it is sufficient to just obstruct at every turn, and wait for Trump to implode.
If Democrats truly believed their own rhetoric that Trump is an existential threat to our republic, then the first step toward saving it would be to demonstrate to the American people that they are a different party than the one that has suffered one shellacking after another at their hands.
So how, precisely, has their behavior since the election done that? And who, thus far, has the so-called resistance actually persuaded?
But maybe it doesn't matter so long as you recite Hillary 48.2 percent to Trump 46.1 percent.
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Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.
Editorial on 03/27/2017