There have been a lot of articles about the 2016 U.S.A. Presidential election and possible outcomes. Most are long essays about a changing U.S.A. that aren’t backed by real numbers. So I decided to run the numbers myself.

To give a brief background for people who aren’t in the U.S. or don’t know how elections are won here, U.S. elections are won by state. Every state has a certain number of the 538 total electoral votes. If you get the most votes for president in a state, you get every electoral vote in that state (with exceptions from just two states). So, if a candidate wins Florida by just 1%, they still get all 29 Florida electoral votes.

The minimum change to swing the election

Many states were very close: in Michigan and Pennsylvania, the combined margin for the winner, Donald Trump, was just 79,848. In other words, if just 40,000 Trump voters in Michigan and Pennsylvania instead chose Clinton, she would have won those states, and won the entire election by 18 electoral votes.

(Note: since I wrote this paragraph the counts now make minimum now looks closer to 35,000, so the argument is strengthened.)

40,000 swing voters is just 0.011% of all people living in the U.S.A. About 1 in every 10,000 people. To appreciate how small a swing that is, here is 40,000 people next to everyone in the U.S.A. by how they voted or didn’t vote for President:

Still with us? Clearly, there are many factors that could have changed such a thin margin. Even if we look at the result across all states, not just the minimum in Michigan and Pennsylvania, it’s still only a 1.5% shift among voters and less than a 1% shift across the entire U.S.A. population.

Here’s a version that you can print out for arguments over the next 4 to 8 years. Keep it handy in case your Republican family and friends try to argue that the victory was a landslide, or if your Democratic family and friends argue that Hillary Clinton winning the popular vote meant that the majority of people in the U.S.A. voted for her:

There are many other ways to look at the data to realize how close it was. Clinton received about 2 to 3 million more votes for president (although not enough to get the majority of the votes) but didn’t win enough electoral votes from the states. Within the states, candidates don’t need more than 50% of votes to win a state. In 26% of states no candidate received more than 50% of the presidential votes, because many votes went to independent and third-party candidates.

In other democratic countries where I have lived, votes are counted differently and would have produced different outcomes.

In Sierra Leone, the 2007 Election produced a result with no candidate receiving more than 50% of the vote for president, so an additional run-off election was called where people voted just for the top two candidates. It was a tense time to be living there, but thankfully was a largely peaceful pass-off to the newly elected party. If the U.S.A. had this system, there would have been an additional election with only Clinton and Trump as candidates.

In Australia, votes are preferential, which gives a quicker method than a run-off when there is no clear winner. For example, everyone can choose their preferred candidates in order. In Utah, for example, Trump received 46% of the vote, Clinton 29%, McMullin 21%, Johnson 3.4%, and Stein 0.8%. If it had a preferential system, the McMullin, Johnson, Stein voters could have also expressed their preference for Trump or Clinton, giving one of the two candidates more than 50% and ensuring that every vote counted. In Australia it is common for minor parties to determine election outcomes when preferences are calculated. In several past U.S.A. elections, this would have given a losing party the majority, and in general it would make it easier for new parties to start attracting enough votes to battle the two major ones as people wouldn’t feel like their votes were wasted.

I also lived in one arcane country that has a house of government restricted to leaders of the state-sanctioned religion and the descendants of wealthy land-owners. The other house of government is theoretically more open, even though they meet in a Medieval Palace decorated with giant religious scriptures.

… but enough about the United Kingdom. Jokes aside, the U.K. is clearly a democratic nation today, that would never be so medieval as to declare the earth was flat or deny what continent they are in.

In any of these countries, a difference of 40,000 people is tiny. To put it in perspective in the U.S.A., a little more than 40,000 people visit Disneyland each day. For American football, even the least popular NFL matches attract more than 40,000 people to the stadium. I enjoyed visiting Disneyland as a child, and I enjoyed watching the Seahawks demolish the Rams two weeks ago, cheering along with the other 70,000 people at CenturyLink Field. But I really hope those 40,000 swing voters put more consideration into their votes, than into their visits to sporting events and theme parks. As people left CenturyLink in the fourth quarter, 40,000 did not seem like a lot of people as I looked around from my seat at the half empty stadium.

Both Clinton and Trump played the U.S.A. voting system by campaigning more in swing states and knew this was a potential outcome that could advantage either candidate. So whichever way the election went, you can’t complain that your candidate lost. But if you are affected by the outcome of the election, you can complain about how few people determined the result, the method by which that result is determined, and the consequences it has for your life. You can, and should, continually question the democratic process in any country that you live in or that has influence over you.

A Split U.S.A.?

Don’t believe the long articles talking about how this election showed a newly fractured U.S.A. because of the appeal to right wing extremists. The same reporters who wrote meaningless articles with terrible predictions in advance of the election are now trying to write long articles explaining the election results as if it was a landslide or dramatic change. It wasn’t. It was 40,000 people, just 0.01% of the population, which any number of factors could have swung either way.

The U.S.A. is slowly embracing equality and obviously has a long way to go. The first Back to the Future film was released closer to when Rosa Parks decided to sit at the front of a bus than today. The Civil Rights Act that finally ended all state and local segregation laws only came into law in 1964. Or to put it another way, Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation was released closer to a time with legal racial segregation in the U.S.A. than today.

Hint: it’s only in black & white for stylistic reasons – it’s not that long ago. The clip has 97.5% positive votes on YouTube (including mine – I was permitted to vote on this clips, but not the election, like the majority of people in the U.S.A.). So it’s clear the U.S.A. has majority who believe in a nation united in rhythm.

Discrimination against minorities and foreigners is going to take longer, but it’s moving in the right direction. As I shared in my last post, every California county voted in favor of allowing bilingual education:

Every California county voted to repeal English immersion & reinstate bilingual education. A unified state in support of diversity. pic.twitter.com/sNDGLyq8Op

— Robert Munro (@WWRob) November 9, 2016

The U.S.A. is still a country that overwhelmingly embraces plurality and equality. The average U.S.A. household has 2.5 people. So the not only did the majority of people not vote for Trump, the majority of U.S.A. households did not have a single person who voted for Trump. The same is true for Clinton. Neither candidate represents the majority the nation, but we expressed our support for diversity in many other ways.

Robert Munro
December, 2016