Eric Olson Notes:

Hello,

Much ado has been made of the of the popular vote in the 2016 election being won by Hillary Clinton.  The raw numbers do bear that out.

Clinton 65,534,281(48.05%) to Trump 62,855,393(46.09%) an edge of 2,678,888 or just under 2%. However looking even a little deeper into the numbers shows that California supported Hillary over Trump by over 4.4 million votes.  Removing California from the results leaves Clinton with 56,780,493 (46.45%) vs 58,371,583 (47.76%). In other words, California, a state with only 10% of the votes cast is the entire reason Clinton is winning the popular vote.

Now California may be full of wackos (No offense Adrian) but they are still part of the union and shouldn't be summarily discounted as I did. So I dug a little deeper into the numbers.  New York 3,363,109 (2.47%) and Los Angeles 3,421,533 (2.51%) are the largest cities and they voted very similarly in support of Hillary Clinton: New York 73.82%, Los Angeles 72.03%.  The margin of victory in votes by Clinton these two cities was 3,404,953.  In other words, even when including California, the only reason Clinton leads the popular vote is due to voters in Los Angeles and New York City. I know both cities think they are the center of the country, and without the electoral college system, the country would be dominated by them.

I don't know if these numbers actually mean anything, but I thought they were interesting and wanted to share them. Please feel free to use them or discard them as you will.

Note: all figures come from http://uselectionatlas.org/

Note2: for LA figures, I used Los Angeles County. For New York City, I used New York, Westminister, Queens, Bronx and Kings counties.

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No offense taken Eric.  Believe me, I would get out of California if I could, but I bought a bunch of land here to develop property in 2004 and now I am stuck as there is no market in a "Shangrila" county in the wine country with a huge lake in a 60 mile diameter ring of old volcanoes with a big one sitting in the middle of it surrounded by the lake, very picturesque and within 100 miles of the Bay Area, a perfect place to make movies as we have very few small aircraft mucking up soundtracks, but it is run by five elected village idiots who could not pour water out of a boot unless the directions were written on the heel.

Adrian