Hillary Clinton: President of California

We will soon enough be leaving behind the 2016 election and entering the era of the Trump Administration, but now that the popular votes have all finally been counted, it’s worth running a few more times through what we can learn from the numbers. Today’s lesson: the historically unusual dependence of Hillary Clinton on the voters in a single state, California. As you’ve undoubtedly heard by now, Hillary won the national popular vote by 2.86 million votes (48.2% to 46.1%), due entirely to a 4.27 million vote margin of victory in California, which she carried by more than a 30-point margin (61.7% to 31.6%). Her margin in California was a million votes wider than Obama’s in 2008, the previous record for the largest margin in a single state.