Bruising popular vote and one’s ego

President Trump won the 2016 election, and it should be a significant exploit and a humbling challenge to lead this great nation.  And he’s done some things right, since being elected.  But he’s also betrayed what should be trivial facts.  Two of the great examples here are arguments over why he lost the popular vote, and how many people showed up on Inauguration Day.  With all due deference to the President, and being someone who has deeply supported leaders of both parties, this article will focus just on the former topic of the election results.  Being one of the few who long argued successfully (and for the current leader) that Donald Trump was doing far better in our estimation than mainstream media polls exhibit, we have a very superb sense of how the outcome played out the way it did.  President Trump won the election because he campaigned far more effectively than his rival Hillary Clinton, in the states that mattered.  Still, it was a highly contentious campaign season and our pre-election forecasts was very uncertain (unlike that of "pollsters").  The results that we saw on November 9, and verified partially through recounts from the losing candidate, showed that the election results were close enough statistically that we can see an outcome where Hillary Clinton still won the gratuitous popular vote by ~3 million (2% of voters).  No one should care about the popular vote though (and we’ve argued that if we did a-priori than Donald Trump would have likely edged that as well), except the Democrats have since been using this to absurdly emasculate the current president.  The President still won a remarkable race, and can win again in 2020 if he plays his cards right.  But now comes his quarrel, out-of-the-blue, that he lost the popular vote due to ~4 million "illegals".  And gloomily, similar to the politics seen up close with the prior administration, factions are analyzing and twisting his expressions to force a new narrative to fit the statistics (this is not the same as counselor Kellyanne Conway’s now notorious “alternative facts” remark which indicates that the tale is still valid and that other factual information dawdles).  Don’t hold your breath for a reliable investigation conclusion, just as Donald Trump eventually conceded with the President Obama birth certificate hullabaloo.  There is no doubt that illegal immigrants (as did residents and once-alive citizens) casted an exorbitantly high number of invalid votes.  However, it is highly disbelieving that these illegal immigrant votes come anywhere near ~4 million.

We have done extensive research throughout the campaign and afterwards on the election results so one can start here to get up to speed on that work.  In addition, we complemented this with independent (e.g., non-partisan) data from Census, Pew Research, and others to first aggregate statistics on how many illegal aliens live across the U.S.  See chart below.  One will notice that there are very large number of unauthorized immigrants in states such as Texas, where President Trump won the popular vote.  On a lesser point, Mississippi was also adjusted to 1.5% in further analysis below, using dissimilar official state-level data.

 

Now there are multiple factors that map the rise in illegals, with an outside rise in voter turnout and then a very large rise in the popular vote margin shift in 2016 versus prior elections.  This is due to some incidence of illegal voting (though not necessarily from unauthorized aliens and anyway not the complete rationale) that is heavily biased towards Democrats.  And of course we see that this is reflected by California superfluously accounting for nearly 100% of the Hillary Clinton popular vote margin.

 

Even if we remove the change in voter-turnout in these popular illegal immigrant states, we would not be able to close the gap on President Trump’s claim.  And that’s the issue here and the probability math is clear.  Further, one would have to take an incredulous leap to connect other possible voter registration issues (not associated with illegal aliens) to anything related to a sizeable Hillary Clinton advantage (>1 million).  See example below, from only the past day.  So in conclusion President Trump concocted what he didn’t have to.  He briskly and fairly won the 2016 Presidential election, and doesn’t need to formulate frail pretexts regarding a theoretical 4-5 million illegals (when he only lost the popular vote by less than 3 million!)