Grief. Fear. Hysteria. Anger. Protests. Riots. Hate crimes. Arrests. The United States is reeling from the election of President Donald Trump. Ultra-liberal Portland and Seattle revolt as anarchists light fires and smash storefronts. Megadiverse New York City has to impose a no-fly zone over 5th Avenue. LGBT and Mexican flags wave in San Francisco outside high schools. Students in Michigan chant “Build the Wall.” Muslim women have their headscarves torn off. A White man is kicked in the head for being a suspected Trump supporter. Swastika graffiti appears anonymously on walls and doors around the country. Wow just wow, it’s the current year.
The results are still coming in from November 8th. President Trump won the electoral college while Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by a margin of hundreds of thousands. There are now increasingly loud calls to scrap the electoral college for being outmoded and ‘anti-democratic’. Moreover it is the second time in recent history that a Democrat has won the popular vote while losing the election.
Of course, there is a geographic context to all of this. Clinton got far more votes than needed to win in blue states like California and New York. In the West Coast outpost of Latin America, she got around 2.5 million surplus votes, while Shekel Island and its surrounding counties (sans Staten Island) returned around 1.5 million extra ballots. In midsized swing states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, President Trump won by much narrower margins, boosting Clinton’s popular vote even further. And the high margin Republican states have less population to begin with, yielding less popular vote for President Trump’s total. Still, there is a clear geographic component to where Clinton won the popular vote, and that is her carrying the urban corridors of the Northeast and the West Coast, and the Deep South’s black belt. President Trump won the broader swathes of the interior and the non-urban counties.