No, Hillary Clinton would not have won the 2016 presidential election if America determined the president by popular vote

Same for Al Gore in 2000. And Trump in 2024.

Note: None of this post deals with the pros and cons of the electoral college. If you’re against the electoral college, resist the urge to viscerally disagree with what’s written below. This post is about the realities of the 2016 election. I’m not making an argument about what should or shouldn’t be. I’m stating what is.

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I hear it constantly. “Hillary Clinton would have won in 2016 if America decided presidential elections by popular vote!” I’ve seen it on Reddit. I’ve heard well-informed people say it. Even my beloved CGP Grey has a video about it. Either because of denial or wishcasting, people have convinced themselves that in a just world, Hillary Clinton would have won the 2016 election if only America had a different way of determining the winner.

It’s not true.

Fine. I suppose there is one possible world in which it’s true that Hillary Clinton becomes president if the popular vote determined the winner. If, on November 9th, 2016, the day after the election, congress would have come together and voted to add an amendment to the constitution saying that the rules that governed the election the day before were wrong, and that whoever got the most votes would be sworn in that January, then yes, Hillary Clinton would have become president in 2017 instead of Donald Trump. Obviously this was never going to happen for a host of reasons. Most importantly, it would be grossly unethical to change the rules for winning an election after said election.

Of course, people don’t mean that Congress should have changed the Constitution after the 2016 vote to retroactively change the rules. They mean the constitution should have been changed before 2016 so the winner of the popular vote becomes president. Again, the point of this post is not to opine on whether that would be a good idea (I think there are good arguments for both keeping the electoral college and moving to a popular vote). The point is to say that it is objectively incorrect to say that had the 2016 election been determined by the winner of the popular vote, Hillary Clinton would have become president. The reality is there’s no way to know who would have won.

The reasoning is obvious. If the popular vote carried the election, the entire approach to elections would be different. One of the lead questions for any candidate would be “can they win the popular vote?” The Democratic and Republican primaries in 2016 would have a totally different focus. They would have different rules, and party insiders would be pushing for different nominees. Maybe one or both parties removes the winner-take-all approach in many states when choosing a candidate during the primaries. Likability polling would be a key metric for evaluating candidates. It’s quite possible that with a popular vote structure, neither Clinton nor Trump are even their parties’ nominees in 2016.

But fine. Let’s say that with the 2016 election being decided by popular vote, Trump and Clinton are still their respective party’s nominees. Even so, it would still be incorrect to say that Clinton would have won had the rules been different. Currently, the election rests on a handful of swing states. After securing their nominations, presidential candidates spend their time in places like Ohio, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina. These states are likely to determine the election. Other states are roundly ignored. Trump, for example, spent little time campaigning in California. That may seem odd, given that he secured more votes in California than in all but two states.¹ Under the electoral college system, it makes perfect sense. Trump didn’t spend time campaigning in California because he knew there was no way he won the state. Ditto for Clinton in Texas. If the winner was determined by popular vote, this would be far, far, different. Republican candidates would spend a lot of time in California, and Democratic candidates would campaign in Texas because there are millions of voters in those states. That would change the election significantly.

Crucially, the people who vote would change dramatically if the popular vote carried the day. Republicans in San Francisco and Democrats in Dallas don’t have much of a reason to vote for president these days. For better or worse, the residents of their states have decided they will vote D or R, respectively, even if their party’s candidate is a dead raccoon. If the winner was decided by popular vote, millions of additional Americans would cast their ballot in a close race, knowing that their vote could have an impact. There would be no such thing as a safe state or swing state, because states would no longer decide the election.

Finally, one of the most important aspects of the 2016 election is that no one “won” the popular vote. At least not in the sense that other countries use to determine their president. Not Clinton or Trump or anyone else. No candidate earned a majority of votes in the 2016 election. Clinton won a plurality of votes, but at 48.2 percent, a plurality is not a majority. The same thing happened to Trump in 2024, who won 49.8 percent of the popular vote. A majority of people who voted in 2016 voted against Hillary Clinton and a majority of voters in 2024 voted against Donald Trump. In every country I’m aware of that uses the popular vote to determine their head of government, an election that results in no one having a majority of the votes goes to a runoff election between the top two vote getters. In a runoff between Clinton and Trump in 2016, who would have won? Likely Clinton, but again, that’s not known with certainty.

On one hand, Clinton won a plurality in the initial election, giving her an edge. Winning a plurality in the first round, however, does not guarantee a victory in a runoff between the top two candidates. Just ask Keiko Fujimori of Peru. In the 2016 Peruvian elections, Fujimori dominated the first round, winning 39.86 percent of the vote. In a distant second was Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, who won 21.05 percent of the vote. In the second round, Kuczynski pulled off the upset, eking out the vote 50.12 percent to 49.88 percent.² The same thing happened in Poland in 2025, when the winner of the first round came in second during the runoff.

The same could have happened to Clinton. After coming in second in the first round, Trump could have pulled the upset in the second round. In the 2016 election, Clinton won 65.9 million votes to Trump’s 63.0 a difference of 2.9 million votes. Other candidates received 7.8 million votes. Would those 7.8 million voters have broken towards Clinton or Trump? How many people would have changed their vote? We will never know.

Saying that Donald Trump only became president in 2016 because of the electoral college is like saying Stephen Curry is only a superstar because the NBA values shots made from a long distance at three points while shots made from a short distance are only valued at two points. One could say that Curry wouldn’t be as good of player if there was no such thing as the 3-point line. That his stats would be much worse. This thinking ignores the reality that Curry takes so many long shots because they are valued 50 percent higher. Obviously NBA players would not take nearly as many shots from 3-point range if there was no such thing as the 3-point line. In the same way, if the US didn’t have the electoral college, campaigns would be very different.

Ultimately, the United States has never decided its president by popular vote. That system is not likely to change. Small states have a disproportionate amount of sway in the electoral college, and they will never give that up. Winning the electoral college means winning the presidency. Winning the popular vote by a minute amount signifies little, results in nothing, and people should stop pretending otherwise.

1. Texas and Florida netted Trump the most votes.

2. I find it fascinating that a Peruvian election could have a runoff between candidates named Fujimori and Kuczynski.