
Your Candidate Won the Popular Vote? Irrelevant - gnicholas
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2016/11/09/your-candidate-got-more-of-the-popular-vote-irrelevant/
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gnicholas
It's also worth noting that if we had a popular voting system for President,
there would have been fewer protest votes in states where the EC outcome was
never in doubt (CA, TX, etc.). So it's likely that Johnson (and other third-
party candidates) would have received fewer votes. In this case, most of
Johnson's would _probably_ have gone for Trump. This is not for sure, but
Johnson was the generally-accepted alternative candidate for most Republicans
(outside of UT, where McMullin got on the ballot and made a good showing).

Johnson received nearly twice as many votes as all other third-party
candidates (3% vs 1.7%), so it's hard to know how it would have all broken
down at the end of the day.

But it's quite possible that—even if the campaigns hadn't redirected
resources, which of course they would have—Trump still would have won.

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dmfdmf
And people forget the measurement tolerance of the voting system itself. If
Clinton's popular vote margin over Trump is 200,000 votes out of 60M votes
cast for each (in round numbers that I've heard quoted) that is probably not
within the bounds of expected error or variance.

