by Sandy » Tue Nov 29, 2016 9:39 am
A landslide isn't determined by the number of "counties" that a candidate carries, but by the margin between the top vote getter and the second place finisher. Counties are a matter of geography. When I taught Texas History, in the late 90's, it was noted that half of the population of the state lived in seven counties--Harris, Dallas, Bexar, Tarrant, Travis, El Paso, and Nueces, with the other half in the remaining 248. You can talk all you want to about the elite who live on the coasts, but its people who vote, not counties. Here in Pennsylvania, eight of the 67 counties account for 55% of the registered voters. And in my home state of Arizona, one county, Maricopa, has 75% of the population and the voters. The Electoral College skews the value of votes, so that it takes fewer votes in smaller states to equal one electoral vote. Wyoming has fewer than 600,000 people, but has three votes, the same as the District of Columbia, which has 700,000 people. Likewise, each individual vote in California is worth almost 10% less toward electoral votes than in the next largest state, Texas, and Texas votes are worth only 60% of what Wyoming votes are worth.
Regardless of what statistics you cite, there is one clear statistic in this election, and that is the majority lost. Democratic candidates for the house and senate bested their Republican counterparts by almost 5% of the vote across the board, and they did gain seats, but not comparable to the outcome of the vote. Hillary Clinton will, for at least four years, be the second highest vote getter in American history, next to Barack Obama, beating both Romney's 2012 total and McCain's 2008 total, and Trump's 2016 total.
If you remove the impediments to a representative vote count, essentially the gerrymandered congressional districts and the electoral college, the "will of the people" was expressed by the five percentage point majority of votes that Democrats running for congress got over Republicans, and by the more than two million more votes Clinton received over Trump.