I don’t know if it is a “talking point”, or where I heard it, but I heard that campaigns are based on the strategy of winning the battleground states, of winning the electoral vote, state by state.
And the idea is, that if we had the popular vote determine elections, that campaigns would be run differently.
For example, Trump never visited California after the convention, because there was no way he would win the electoral vote in such a Democrat state. If we had the popular vote as decisive, he may have visited to try to trim Hillary’s lead in that state. But under the current system we have, with 48 of 50 states allocating electoral votes on a winner take all basis, it made no sense for Trump to go to California.
So if we had the popular vote as decisive, the campaigns would have been run differently, and we would have seen campaign time, ads, resources, etc. allocated differently among the states, than we saw actually happen in this election.
And if campaigns had been run differently, you may well have seen different vote totals.
And for all Hillary’s bitching and her henchmen bitching, remember Hillary got 48% of the popular vote. 52% of America wanted another candidate. She can hardly claim to be the choice of a majority.
The Clintons didn’t bitch about the electoral vote, when Bill Clinton won two elections and got less than 50% of the vote each time.
Absolutely, you play the game according to the rules. There’s no way Trump could win CA, so why bother putting ANY resources against it....vs. coming to Michigan MULTIPLE times and flipping it red.
I think you can also make the argument that voter behavior is suppressed in states dominated by one party. It’s likely that Republican voters in California and Massachusetts and Maryland don’t turn out in force because their votes absolutely do not count. Same for democrat voters in South Carolina and Oklahoma. But still, there aren’t enough enemy states that can vote to amend the constitution of the EC provision.