Hillary Did Not Win The Popular Vote

“Not my president”, was probably the mantra for the 4 million signers of a petition which urged electoral college members to disregard the will of their constituents and submit to the tyranny of the majority because Hillary Clinton won the popular vote.

That is just plain wrong.

Hillary Clinton did obtain more votes than Donald Trump but that wasn’t part of the game. You cannot win something if there isn’t a game being played. If the popular vote was relevant, perhaps Donald Trump would have set a foot in California and perhaps persuaded some voters to change their minds or perhaps to persuade some less liberal voters to venture out to the voting booth to cast a vote without considering that their a vote for Trump in California or in New York is somewhat futile. Point is, that if you change the rules of a game after the game you can’t really make any ex post assumptions with regard to the outcome under the revised rules. To say Hillary Clinton won the popular vote is unsupportable, because no such contest was ever held.

I am a NY Yankees fan, and although I was a mere babe in 1960, and I don’t remember the game, I do remember my father’s angry reaction to Bill Mazeroski’s homer to win the series for the Pirates. Or the string of obscenities directed at Ralph Terry and Casey Stengel. I can fantasize that Rachael Maddow may have had a similar reaction at about 2:00 AM on November 9.

Someone may have made the argument that baseball is a game in which one team tries to score more runs that the other. In those seven games the Yankees scored 55 runs and the Pirates scored 27. So, the argument could be made that the Yanks outscored the Pirates and therefor are the rightful world series champions. Bobby Richardson was the MVP, for cryin’ out loud!

Absurd to be sure, but undoubtedly today would have some declaring, “Pirates are not my champion”, and sending agents to disrupt the victory parade down Grant Street.

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