Clinton Leads Trump In Popular Votes By More Than 1.7M

Hillary Clinton’s lead over Donald Trump in the popular vote is approaching two million votes, as the Democratic candidate continues to shatter records with the most dramatic popular vote win by any presidential candidate to lose an election.

According to the Cook Political Report’s tracker, updated on November 16, Clinton has a popular vote lead greater than 1.7 million votes, with 63,649,978 to Trump’s 61,943,67. Though Clinton has a large lead in non-swing states, Trump has nearly 900,000 more votes in the 13 battleground states, with 22,103,803 to Clinton’s 21,243,402.

“We probably have about 7 million votes left to count,” Cook Political Report Editor David Wasserman, who is tracking turnout, told the Atlantic shortly after Election Day. “A majority of them are on the coasts, in New York, California, and Washington. [Clinton] should be able to win those votes, probably 2-1.”

In other words, the majority of the votes not counted are in states that Clinton comfortably won, so they are expected to expand her lead but will not have any bearing over Trump’s Electoral College tally or his massive lead in the Midwest, where record numbers of Democrats flipped to supporting Trump.

“We just saw massive shifts in the industrial Midwest from ’12 to ’16, and those are the same voters” who supported Obama,” Wasserman explained.

Wasserman said that he expects Clinton to lead the popular vote by two full percentage points by the time the Electoral College officially casts its ballots in mid-December. He also noted that the number of voters who turned out to vote for Clinton are not vastly different than those who supported President Barack Obama’s reelection in 2012.

With Clinton taking in significantly more popular votes than Trump, millions of people are urging members of the Electoral College who officially cast their votes for president to act as “Faithless Electors” and cast their vote for Clinton, even if Trump won in their district, in an online petition on Change.org. The call to action, which than 4,550,000 individuals have signed, says that electors who vote against their constituents may be fined, but that it is legal to do so in more than half of the states.

Sources: Cook Political, The Atlantic, Change.org / Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore/Flickr