The pollsters were not wrong after all. Hillary Clinton was the most popular candidate in the US presidential election as she now has amassed two million popular votes ahead of President-elect Donald Trump.
Cook Political Report on Wednesday said Clinton had 64,225,863 votes compared to Trump’s 62,210,612 votes, the UPI reported.
Clinton’s victory in the popular vote has generated criticism against the United States’ Electoral College system.
Some activists and academics that formed a coalition are calling on U.S. authorities to fully audit or recount the election results, particularly in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
The coalition hopes Clinton’s campaign will join its efforts as it prepares to deliver a report of its concerns to congressional committee chairs and federal authorities next week.
“I’m interested in verifying the vote,” Dr. Barbara Simons, an adviser to the U.S. election assistance commission and expert on electronic voting, told The Guardian. “We need to have post-election ballot audits.”
Following the 2016 election, Clinton’s loss is the fifth time in U.S. history a candidate who won the popular vote did not assume the presidency. The last time was in 2000, when former Vice President Al Gore defeated then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush in the popular vote, but lost the recount in Florida — giving Bush the needed electoral votes to win the executive branch.
Since his election victory, Trump has defended the Electoral College, despite calling the system a “disaster for a democracy” in 2012.
In another report, Reuters said Donald Trump won the U.S. presidency with less support from black and Hispanic voters than any president in at least 40 years.
The news agency came to this conclusion in a review of polling data.
Trump was elected with 8 percent of the black vote, 28 percent of the Hispanic vote and 27 percent of the Asian-American vote, according to the Reuters/Ipsos Election Day poll.
Among black voters, his showing was comparable to the 9 percent captured by George W. Bush in 2000 and Ronald Reagan in 1984. But Bush and Reagan both did far better with Hispanic voters, capturing 35 percent and 34 percent, respectively, according to exit polling data compiled by the non-partisan Roper Center for Public Opinion Research.
And Trump’s performance among Asian-Americans was the worst of any winning presidential candidate since tracking of that demographic began in 1992.
The racial polarization behind Trump’s victory has helped set the stage for tensions that have surfaced repeatedly since the election, in white supremacist victory celebrations, in anti-Trump protests and civil rights rallies, and in hundreds of racist, xenophobic and anti-Semitic hate crimes documented by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which tracks extremist movements. The SPLC reports there were 701 incidents of “hateful harassment and intimidation” between the day following the Nov. 8 election and Nov. 16, with a spike in such incidents in the immediate wake of the vote.
