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Final 2016 Election Results: Hillary Clinton’s Popular Vote Lead Continues To Grow, She Likely Beat Donald Trump By More Than 1 Million Votes

By Nathan Francis
Published on: 07:14 PST, Nov 14, 2016

The final 2016 election results will show a big gap between the popular vote and electoral college, with Hillary Clinton ending with close to 1 million more votes in total but losing by more than 70 electoral votes.

Clinton will become the first candidate since Al Gore in 2000 to lose the race while still gaining more votes than their opponent, but a deeper dig into the election results show where Clinton went wrong. While she was able to run up the score in the most left-leaning states of New York and California while also getting a higher share in deep-red states where she still lost, Clinton was unable to win over enough voters in what turned out to be the key swing states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan.

While Hillary Clinton will likely end with a healthy lead in the popular vote, the final 2016 election results also show that she struggled in comparison to the last two election wins for Barack Obama. Donald Trump’s final vote total will be roughly in line with Republican totals in 2012 and 2008, more than likely falling below the total number of votes Mitt Romney received four years ago when he lost in something close to an electoral college landslide.

But as The Atlantic noted, Hillary Clinton’s popular vote total will continue to grow as the final mail-in and absentee ballots are counted — with most of the counting still coming in Democratic strongholds.

“We probably have about 7 million votes left to count,” said David Wasserman, an editor at Cook Political Report who is tracking turnout. “A majority of them are on the coasts, in New York, California, and Washington. She should be able to win those votes, probably 2-1.”The Cook Political Report is keeping track of the final 2016 election results in real time, finding that Clinton has been ticking upward in the past few days. Experts say her final total will likely top 1 million more votes than Trump.

But the final election results showing Hillary Clinton with close to 1 million more votes than Donald Trump also display exactly where her failures led to Trump’s electoral college win. Politico noted that Clinton lost rural voters by a three-to-one margin, a deficit that helped Trump in the Midwest swing states.

“The rural voting bloc, long a Republican stronghold, has shrunk dramatically over the years, as farms have become more efficient and jobs have migrated to cities and suburbs. About 20 percent of the country, just less than 60 million people, live in rural America. This year, rural voters made up 17 percent of the electorate, according to exit polling.

“But in a year with lackluster urban turnout for Clinton, the rural vote ended up playing a key role in Trump’s sweep of crucial Rust Belt swing states, which also tend to have much larger rural populations.”

There had reportedly been some in Democratic circles urging the Clinton campaign to do more outreach to rural voters as well as working class white voters, two demographics with a large overlap and ones where Trump held a large advantage.

Politico noted that Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack urged the campaign to take more efforts to reach out to rural voters, and Bill Clinton had reportedly been pushing for more outreach to white working class voters, the coalition that helped him to victories in 1992 and 1996.

Bill Clinton’s advice was ultimately bypassed as Hillary Clinton’s campaign took on a strategy of reaching out to swing states like North Carolina and Florida, and even stretched into Arizona in the final weeks. She would lose all three of those states.

While the numbers have been illuminating, there has been some difficulty in finding the final 2016 election results. For more than a day, Google listed a WordPress blog called 70 News that wrongly claimed Donald Trump had won the popular vote by roughly 700,000 votes.

The incorrect story led to some condemnation from other news outlets that had accurately reported the final vote totals, and Business Insider noted that Google is looking into how the fake story was able to gain prominence.

“A Google representative told Business Insider on Monday that the company was looking into an issue that displayed an inaccurate source of the popular-vote tally for Tuesday’s US election in its top search result,” the report noted.

For those keeping track of Hillary Clinton’s popular vote lead over Donald Trump, the up-to-date final 2016 election results can be found here.

[Featured Image by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images]
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