╌>

Huffington Post Contributor: Hillary Clinton’s Failure to Win Even 20 States Means She Is ‘Legitimate President-Elect’

  

Category:  News & Politics

Via:  walleye-cronkite  •  7 years ago  •  36 comments

Huffington Post Contributor: Hillary Clinton’s Failure to Win Even 20 States Means She Is ‘Legitimate President-Elect’

MadamPresidentNewsweekCoverGetty640x480.jpg


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Failed Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton’s inability to win even 20 of America’s 50 states means she is the “legitimate president-elect,” a contributor to the off-the-rails  progressive blog Huffington Post wrote .


“Hillary Clinton is the Legitimate President-Elect,” reads the headline on the Huffington Post for a piece from “political writer and commentator” Alex Mohajer.

“The evidence is clear. Hillary Clinton is the rightful president-elect, and courts must use the broad discretionary powers with which they are vested to enjoin an illegitimate president from taking office,” the sub-headline on Mohajer’s piece reads.

The post got 17,000 shares on social media, according to the Huffington Post’s own metrics on the page, which means this is a popular viewpoint on the hard left.

Clinton failed to win even 20 U.S. states. The only states Clinton won outright were Washington state, Oregon, California, Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico, Minnesota, Illinois, Virginia, Maryland, New York, Delaware, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Hawaii. She won Maine’s first congressional district and the District of Columbia as well. In total, that means Hillary Clinton won 19 and a half states and the only territory—Washington, D.C.—that has electoral votes. In other words, Hillary Clinton wasn’t strong enough as a candidate to win 20 states.

 

President-elect Donald J. Trump, the rightful and legitimate president-elect on the other hand, won 30 and a half states. In addition to Maine’s second congressional district, Trump won the following states: Alaska, Arizona, Utah, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Florida. In other words, Trump’s 30 and a half states smoked Clinton’s 20 and a half states.

In several of the states where Clinton won, she barely eked out a victory. In Minnesota, for instance, she only bested Trump by about 43,000 votes. The fourth place candidate, independent ex-Republican Evan McMullin—who placed behind third place Libertarian Gary Johnson—actually got more votes than Clinton’s margin of victory in Minnesota. That’s remarkable because Republicans haven’t won Minnesota in a presidential election since 1972 in Richard Nixon’s re-election campaign, and Trump barely focused on the state at all, having just one staffer on the ground according to campaign sources, spending no money on in-state advertising, and appearing there only a couple times throughout the entire campaign—including just once in the final few months. In Minnesota, she only earned 46.9 percent of the vote to take the state’s 10 electoral votes.

In New Hampshire, as well, Clinton won by less than 3,000 votes in a state where more than 700,000 were cast—and she didn’t even get 50 percent there. In New Hampshire, Clinton’s 47.6 percent was less than half a percent better than Trump’s 47.2 percent—hardly a decisive victory there.

Colorado, another state where Hillary Clinton not only failed to hit 50 percent but lagged down at 47.2 percent, gave its nine electoral votes to her even though she barely squeaked by with a minuscule 71,741 vote lead over Trump to win. And in Nevada, where she also finished under 50 percent, Clinton won the state’s six electoral votes by getting just 26,434 more votes than Trump—a state where thanks to now retired former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s prowess, she was supposed to perform much better. Even New Mexico almost handed her defeat, as she squeaked by in that state by just 64,849 votes.

In fact, nationwide, out of the 19 and a half states Clinton won, six of them—New Hampshire, Virginia, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, and Minnesota—delivered her victories with less than 50 percent of the state’s vote. Out of the 30 and a half states Trump won, only five—Arizona, Utah, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin—were with less than 50 percent of the state’s vote. In the case of Utah, fluke candidate McMullin pulled 21 percent of the vote under an odd set of favorite son circumstances that didn’t translate at all nationally—it wasn’t Trump weakness or Clinton strength in that case—so ultimately there were really only four such instances of Trump winning with less than 50 percent out of many more states he won.

In other words, not only did Trump absolutely crush Clinton to cruise to 306 electoral votes—Clinton only won a measly 232—but in the states he won, he won definitively. In the states where Clinton won, she barely squeaked by.

Don’t let logic stand in the way of a teary-eyed progressive snowflake, though. Citing claims from Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) that Trump is not a “legitimate” incoming president, the Huffington Post contributor Mohajer describes mythical Americans watching in “abject horror” as the transition to an “increasingly belligerent” Donald Trump presidency carries on. Mohajer writes:


The unrelenting onslaught and sheer breadth of scandal and conflict has left an American electorate fatigued and uncertain as to the best path of resistance following a protracted election season that may be the most volatile in history. As Americans, we are culturally predisposed to seek rapid closure rather than answers, oftentimes more comfortable expressing outrage at a perceived injustice than we are willing to remedy it. In grief and in politics, we are taught to stick to the script.


Mohajer carries on throughout his piece to point out that intelligence agencies believe that the Russians hacked the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s emails—leaking the disclosures that proved Clinton cronies and the DNC rigged the primaries to steal the nomination from Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, that Clinton did say very controversial things to closed-door groups of bankers in paid speeches, that the media industry was by and large in the tank for Clinton entirely from the get-go to the point where so-called “reporters” would run their copy by top Democrats for approval before filing to their editors, and so much more—and then WikiLeaks published them.

Never mind the fact that these so-called intelligence agencies also circulated what’s widely now believed to be a discredited report filled with fantasies on this front that caught BuzzFeed and CNN printing “fake news” to different degrees. The intelligence agencies—the same ones that told us there were indeed weapons of mass destruction in Iraq—have not provided a single iota of proof to the public yet. There may be proof in the classified briefings, and even if such proof emerges publicly later, that doesn’t discount the fact that what was disclosed on WikiLeaks amounts in a just world to what should be Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalism given the breadth and depth of what it exposed.

It’s not the Russians’ fault—or the fault of whoever actually hacked them if the Russians didn’t, assuming they weren’t provided by a human intelligence source (still a possibility)—or the fault of Republicans including Trump or the fault of WikiLeaks that the DNC and Podesta didn’t secure their email systems enough. Republicans at the Republican National Committee (RNC) did, as has been established, work with law enforcement to ensure there were appropriate security measures on their email systems.

Nonetheless, the Huffington Post’s Mohajer argues that the Russians tilted the election to Trump and stole it from “legitimate president-elect” Hillary Clinton. Mohajer wrote:


Every major intelligence agency in the country has reached the same conclusion: Russian hackers engaged in cyber attacks with the express purpose of helping Donald Trump win the election. They operated at the directive of Russian President Vladimir Putin, apparently motivated by his hatred for Clinton. As secretary of state, Clinton was ‘by far the most aggressive and outspoken’ American official to counter Putin’s efforts to expand his global reach, famously criticizing him for undermining his own elections and likening him publicly to Hitler. Clinton’s brass in standing up to Putin, by all accounts a murderer and former KGB Agent who has bombed civilian hospitals in Aleppo and is the primary backer of Syrian dictator Bashir Al-Assad, should have inspired, at the very least, a nod of respect from conservatives. Instead, Putin’s approval ratings have gone up among Republicans. Years of partisan squabbling have trained both sides to turn every political conflict into a ‘Democrats versus Republicans’ issue, and subsequently conservatives would rather side with Putin than acknowledge the legitimacy of a Hillary Clinton presidency. The result? A troubling trend towards normalizing Trump’s ‘unpresidented’ behavior, and a reluctance to look at the evidence.


Mohajer proceeds to present his case first using the irrelevant popular vote numbers in the United States. Sure, Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump in the popular vote—thanks in large part to coastal cities like New York City and Los Angeles that are out-of-touch with the rest of the country—by just under three million votes. But since the time of the founding fathers, the popular vote in presidential elections in the United States has not mattered. What wins or loses presidential elections is the electoral college, and it was on this front that Trump massively succeeded—winning scores more votes than Clinton, absolutely crushing her throughout the country.

Mohajer’s second evidential point is a study that claims that Russian hacking—which he still hasn’t evidentially established actually happened—somehow influenced the “outcome of the election.” Nobody, not even Mohajer, claims that Russians hacked U.S. voting machines or election and vote-counting infrastructure. So, there is really no way to know—and it’s up for debate—how much each story did or didn’t impact the outcome.

Sure, the stories about the Podesta and DNC emails revealed significant corruption and embarrassing outcomes about different things they did and probably did have an impact in the race, as they informed people more about both entities and how they stole the nomination from Sanders and how Clinton herself is an open borders globalist, among other things. But does that mean the Russians—if they did hack this information and provide it to WikiLeaks for publication—stole the election from Clinton by enlightening the American people with factual, interesting, newsworthy, and revealing information about her?

Mohajer’s third point is that Trump went to Russia in 1987.

“Donald Trump has been openly dishonest about his relationship with Vladimir Putin and his ties to Russia,” Mohajer wrote. “An EIR article from 1987 details how the Russian government was gifting Donald with all-expense paid trips to Moscow and grooming him for a presidential run.”

More


Tags

jrDiscussion - desc
[]
 
JohnRussell
Professor Principal
link   JohnRussell    7 years ago

This is a really embarrassing article - one of many reasons ;

In other words, not only did Trump absolutely crush Clinton to cruise to 306 electoral votes

306 electoral votes is one of the worst winning totals since 1916 when the number of electors was increased to near it's present amount. 

 

 
 
 
Nowhere Man
Junior Guide
link   Nowhere Man  replied to  JohnRussell   7 years ago

John, you still don't research much do you.

1960 was the first year for 537 EC votes going to 538 in '64. Going beyond that for comparison is apples to oranges. and skews the results.

So Trump had 306 EC votes.

Lets see... Putting them in order of victory total....

1984 Reagan 525, Mondale 13

1972 Nixon 520, McGovern 17

1980 Reagan 489, Carter 49

1964 Johnson 486, Goldwater 52

1988 Bush 426, Dukakis 111

1996 Clinton 379, Dole 159

1992 Clinton 370, Bush 168

2008 Obama 365, McCain 173

2012 Obama 332, Romney 206

2016 Trump 306, Clinton 227

1960 Kennedy had 303 Nixon 219

1968 Nixon 301, Humphrey 191

1976 Carter 297, Ford 240

2004 Bush 286, Kerry 251

2000 Bush 271, Gore 266

 

So, on the scale of great political EC victories, this one (Trump's) doesn't rise above the halfway point. But then neither did both of Obama's.

Figuring Slick Willies being the middle ground.

One of the surprising things when you look at it, everyone was claiming a mandate when Carter was elected. not based upon the actual vote. Carter did worse than Trump and Trump almost as well as Obama.

Your point fails on the anvil of facts...

Sorry

 
 
 
JohnRussell
Professor Principal
link   JohnRussell  replied to  Nowhere Man   7 years ago

In 1912 the electoral college went to 531 electors. 

It is entirely fair to compare 531 to 538. I will admit to one mistake though. 

Trump's 306 is the 8th worst of the 27 elections since 1912, not the fifth worst. 

The 1904 and 1908 winners also exceeded Trump, even though they had a smaller pool of electors to gain them from. 

So for the last 29 presidential elections , Trump comes in 22nd in electoral votes among the winners. 

That does sound like a "crushing " of anyone to me. 

We could also note that Trump's number BARELY beats , and I mean BARELY, Truman Kennedy and Nixon. 

 

NM, you don't get to arbitrarily select 1960 as the breaking point.  ROFL. 

 
 
 
Nowhere Man
Junior Guide
link   Nowhere Man  replied to  JohnRussell   7 years ago

What your missing here is YOU do not get to arbitrarily ignore the rules of mathematics.

You know working with sets.

And that is the only way your point works.

But then again nothing means anything unless John says it is valid.

Thank you for another demonstration of that.

And we all know that in John world, the only facts that are real are those stretched to make his points.

 
 
 
JohnRussell
Professor Principal
link   JohnRussell  replied to  Nowhere Man   7 years ago

Nowhere Man, your argument goes nowhere. You think that if the electoral college grew in 1960 from 531 to 538, that strengthens your position. But actually it weakens it. From 1912 to 1960,  all but two of the winners got more electoral votes than Trump, EVEN THOUGH they had a smaller pool to win from. The winners in 1904 and 1908 also got more electoral votes than Trump , even though then the pool was smaller still. 

Mathematically it would actually benefit Trump's case, potentially, to include the '04 through '56 elections, when the number of electoral votes was a little  smaller. 

If you don't understand that I can't help you. 

 
 
 
Nowhere Man
Junior Guide
link   Nowhere Man  replied to  JohnRussell   7 years ago

Excuse me, when I went to school, there were no exceptions to the rules of math.

if your going to compare sets you need to compare like sets when doing a direct comparison. When you compare unlike sets you introduce deviation and inaccuracy.

So your trying to make an absolute point based upon inaccurate comparisons.

So your right I cannot understand and in fact refuse to understand such that is absolutely false.

There are no grey areas in this, no debate.

You are willing to shy facts to make bullshite arguments to back a spurious claim.

And that is plain on it's face.

Nothing left to talk about.

I'm done here.

 
 
 
JohnRussell
Professor Principal
link   JohnRussell  replied to  Nowhere Man   7 years ago

Of course you are done. You are wrong , or wrong headed. 

Both of us picked a span of years to examine. I picked the last 100 years , because it is a number with some historical weight. People often talk about the last "hundred years". It is also true that around that time the electoral college was expanded to close to what it is now (531 in 1912, then 538 in 1960-now).

You set your boundary at 1960. Fine, you can set whatever boundary you want. Both of us picked years arbitrary years to consider, mine is just a much larger sample. The 538 ec total compared to the 531 ec total is irrelevant.  The smaller number theoretically plays into Trump's favor , yet in reality doesnt help your case. 

You can say whatever you want post 1960, that is your right, but what you say does not in the slightest disprove or change what I said about all the elections from 1904-1960. 

 
 
 
Nowhere Man
Junior Guide
link   Nowhere Man  replied to  JohnRussell   7 years ago

You are just fucking hopeless.

Don't give one damn about anything but the narrative and anything you can manipulate into supporting your narrative.

Everyone pretty much knows this about you so it is strange that people still engage you.

I guess all one can do is continue to point out the inanities of your spiel.

Have a nice day.

 

 

 
 
 
JohnRussell
Professor Principal
link   JohnRussell  replied to  Nowhere Man   7 years ago

Fuck head,  I am the one that made the 100 year comparison. I can make any fucking comparison I want. Nothing in the methodology of my comparison is at all wrong or lacking. The only mistake I made was in the number of times someone had a lower number of EC than Trump because I wrote if from memory and not from looking it up again. 

But the use of the 100 year benchmark was completely valid and the comparisons with Trump hold up. The fact that between 1912 and 1960 the total number of EC votes was 531 and not 538 does not effect the comparison with Trump a fucking bit. You can stand there and blabber and pontificate until Reagan is resurrected and it won't change that fact. 

You are the one who thought you caught me making some sort of "mathematical" error , but you are wrong. 

Ok? 

 

 
 
 
Nowhere Man
Junior Guide
link   Nowhere Man  replied to  JohnRussell   7 years ago

Oh now I'm a "Fuckhead"

Your back down to insulting me.

Ignoring the facts for insults like that makes you more factually accurate..

I'll defer to your claim that the facts are what you claim them to be, and the rules of mathematics don't count.

And your insults prove that.

I'll leave it stand at that.

As asinine as it is, I can't improve on what comes out of your own mouth for proving your asininity.....

Just John being John.

 
 
 
JohnRussell
Professor Principal
link   JohnRussell  replied to  Nowhere Man   7 years ago

Ignoring the facts for insults 

I didn't ignore the facts, I wrote the facts. You didnt disprove or discredit anything I said, but you pat yourself on the back anyway. There is something wrong with you. 

 
 
 
JohnRussell
Professor Principal
link   JohnRussell  replied to  Nowhere Man   7 years ago

What your missing here is YOU do not get to arbitrarily ignore the rules of mathematics.

I didn't . Case closed. 

 
 
 
Old Hermit
Sophomore Silent
link   Old Hermit  replied to  Nowhere Man   7 years ago

New York Times - Dec 2016

Trump’s Electoral
College Victory Ranks
46th in 58 Elections

Members of the Electoral College will meet today to cast their votes for president. President-elect Donald J. Trump has claimed he won the electoral vote in a “landslide,” but he ranks below most presidents in the electoral vote and popular vote margins.

Mr. Trump won 30 states, gathering 306 of 538 electoral votes. There have been 45 presidential elections in which the winning candidate won a larger share of the electoral vote.

 

I think the final official tally was Trump 304, Hillary 227 but the 57% margin of victor for Trump's win, presented by the NY Times, holds up pretty well and shows how his win ranks in the history of Presidential election victories.

 

 

electoral vote  1.png

 

 

 

 

 

 
 
 
Nowhere Man
Junior Guide
link   Nowhere Man  replied to  Old Hermit   7 years ago

And the effort to minimize Trump's win goes on....

Your actually going to use the NYT as a credible source?

{chuckle} that's a good one.

How about using this (archives.gov/federal-register/electoral-college/votes/index), and comparing mathematically identical apples to apples.

The real funny thing is, by trying to discredit trump, you all expose your disingenuousness from 2008 when your side claimed Obama had a mandate and landslide victory.

Either count puts both his wins only little better than Trumps.

The funny thing about doing this kind of comparison, In 1980, Trump wouldn't have been elected dog catcher, but neither would have Obama.

 
 
 
Old Hermit
Sophomore Silent
link   Old Hermit  replied to  Nowhere Man   7 years ago

And the effort to minimize Trump's win goes on....

 

NWM it was Trump who claimed a landslide EC victory. If Obama ever claimed such I sure don't remember it.

Median EC win seems to be the 69.71% at # 29.  I'll let others find where the average EC percentage falls.

 

Showing that his EC victory doesn't even reach the historically average, much less achieve landslide status, isn't an attempt to minimize his win so much as just setting the record straight.

I'm not sure why you've chosen to don the mantle of Trump turd polisher but you shouldn't work so hard at it.

I say, take a page from Gunny's play book and relax.

Fact;  More than 10 million Americans voted against Trump than voted for him.   (G)  True.  So what? Trump's President.

Fact;  Nearly 3 million more Americans chose Hillary for President than chose Trump.  (G) True.  So what? Trump's going to be President.

Fact;  All of our intelligent agencies and the majority of Americans agree that Putin wanted to hurt Hillary and help Trump in this election and to that end he threw the recourse of Russia into achieving his goal.  (G)  True but so what?  Trump will be President.

Fact;  Trump will take the oath of office as the least respected person to ever do so in the history of our polling.   (G)  True, so what?  Doesn't matter because he will be president. 

 

A majority of Americans did not vote for him. A majority of Americans do not respect his ability to do the job. A large number, if not a majority of Americans have decided to exercise their 1st Amendment right to peacefully gather and express their opinion of a Trump Presidency and the policies of his administration, this week an for the foreseeable future.

These things are not some sort of conspiracy to delegitimize a Trump Presidency, they are just statements of facts and Americans being Americans.

 

Hope all the heavy lifting that you and BF have been doing for President Trump don't go unappreciated.  An award is definitely deserved. ( smile )

Russian company minting "In Trump we trust" coins

 
 
 
Spikegary
Junior Quiet
link   Spikegary    7 years ago

In a related note, the Clinton Global Initiative is shutting down.  Dwindling contributions caused shuttering of the 'Initiative'.  Not much news coverage for some reason.  Oh yeah, Trump pulled a classmates pig-tails 60 years ago, story at 6.

 
 
 
Dean Moriarty
Professor Quiet
link   Dean Moriarty    7 years ago

Alex Mohajer is just feeding his target audience what they want to see. He probably doesn't even believe what he's writing. He's just trying to earn a buck off the gullible. 

 
 
 
Aeonpax
Freshman Silent
link   Aeonpax    7 years ago

`

Trump won.  That's the reality. Deal with it, I tell people. I'm sure the loyalist democrats are going to continue down this "whining road" for many months to come.  I ignore them.

 
 

Who is online



60 visitors