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The 2016 U.S. presidential election pitting Republican candidate Donald Trump against Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton was one of the most contentious in American history, capped off by the denouement that although Clinton received nearly 3 million more votes than Trump did, she lost the election because she failed to capture the requisite number of votes under the U.S. electoral college system. Both sides attempted to spin this unusual outcome in their favor, with one popular item reposted by conservative pundits such as Allen B. West in a since-deleted article asserting that Trump had received more votes than Clinton did in a whopping 3,084 out of the 3,141 counties in the U.S.: That claim was woefully wrong. Although Donald Trump did win the popular vote in a significantly larger number of counties than Hillary Clinton did, the margin was not so one-sided. Vote tallies by county differ depending on the standards used, but an Associated Press tally of the actual ratio pegged it at 2,626 to 487, not 3084 to 57: TIME magazine put the county total at 2,649 to 503 in favor of Trump (noting that they had counted Alaska’s 40 state districts as counties instead of its 20 boroughs). The flawed claim about Trump's winning 3,084 out of 3,141 counties was fairly clearly based on a misunderstanding of a 15 November 2016 Breitbart article. That article did not hold that Donald Trump had won county-wide popular votes by a 3084 to 57 margin, but rather that if one excluded all the votes in 57 particular counties from the national total and only counted votes in the remaining 3084 counties, Donald Trump would have won the national popular vote by a 7.5 million votes: The point of the Breitbart article was that Democratic support in national politics tends to be strongly concentrated in smaller, densely-populated urban areas, while Republican support tends to be more broadly spread across larger, sparsely-populated geographic areas: Many other news outlets, such as TIME, made the same point: [T]he majority of [Trump's] counties have small populations, even if they are geographically larger than average. By TIME’s calculations, Trump’s territory accounts for 75.6% of the nation’s land mass, not including water. And yet, he lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes, since Clinton won most high-population, urban areas that take up less space but house many more people. The disparity of population vs. geographic area in voting patterns is not fairly reflected in maps that show vote tallies by geographic area (the first image below) but is much more apparent in cartograms that show regional vote tallies weighted by population density (the second image below): What is the import of this bimodal divide in voting patterns? Is it the case, as Allen B. West adjured, that Large, densely populated Democrat cities (NYC, Chicago, LA, etc) don’t and shouldn’t speak for the rest of our country? That last point is a subjective issue, but we would note that: a) County (and city) voting totals are of no relevance in presidential elections; only state-wide voting totals count. b) The President of the United States is democratically elected to work for the benefit of all the people who live in the United States, not to represent geography. c) The legislative branch of the U.S. federal government was specifically established over 200 years ago to address this bimodal divide by employing a bicameral system in which one chamber (the House of Representatives) represents states based on population, while the other chamber (the Senate) represents all states equally, regardless of population.
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