As it stands right now, Democrats hoping to make themselves feel better and delegitimize the Trump victory are taking solace in the apparent likelihood that Hillary managed to eek out a slight margin in the popular vote. The totals are not final, but as it stands right now, Hillary has 59,623,049 popular votes to Trump's 59,418,103. I guess that might serve as a moral salve for the wound of Trump's likely 300-plus electoral vote total.
But does the popular vote mean, as Democrats surely want it to, that Trump's win is in any way less than 100 percent legitimate?
Not in the slightest. And to prove it, let me offer you a demonstration from the most wonderful world there is - the world of baseball.
Now, if I told you that the Yankees and the Pirates were playing for the world championship, and the Yankees outscored the Pirates 55 runs to 27, would that mean the Yankees had won the title? If you don't know much about baseball, you might think so. But if you are a baseball fan, you know that's not how the championship is decided. You don't play one game. You play a series of games. The winner is not determined by who scores the most runs overall. It's determined by who wins the most games, regardless of the margin in each game.
In the 1960 World Series, the Yankees did indeed outscore the Pirates 55-27 in a seven-game series. And the Pirates won the World Series, 4 games to 3.
Here are the scores of the seven respective games:
Game 1: Pirates 6 Yankees 4
Game 2: Yankees 16 Pirates 3
Game 3: Yankees 10 Pirates 0
Game 4: Pirates 3 Yankees 2
Game 5: Pirates 5 Yankees 2
Game 6: Yankees 12 Pirates 0
Game 7: Pirates 10 Yankees 9
Add up the run totals, and it looks like the Yankees had the much better series. But the objective of the series is to win four games. And the strategies employed by the managers reflect that. Take the second and third games, for example.
In Game 2, the Yankees put the game out of reach with 7 runs in the sixth inning. At that point, the Pirates pulled relief pitcher Fred Green and basically went with a series of lesser relievers to get them through the latter innings of the game. They knew they weren't going to win, so their objective shifted to preserving their pitchers for subsequent games.
Game 3 didn't go much better, with the Yankees jumping out to a 6-0 lead in the first inning. For the Pirates, neither starter Vinegar Bend Mizell nor reliever Clem Labine were able to get through the first inning, and by the middle innings the Pirates were once again in bullpen-preservation mode. They had no choice but to once again concede the game and save their pitching staff for the next night.
The 4 runs the Yankees scored in the fourth inning were obviously legitimate runs, and they counted, but they didn't mean the Pirates' loss in the game counted any more or less. They were just asking their bullpen to get them through the game at that point.
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It's similar in a presidential campaign. Democrats run up their vote totals in states like California and New York, where Republican candidates don't really try to contend because they have little hope of being competitive. The very tiny margins Trump was able to eek out in Michigan and Pennsylvania last night were worth far more than a few thousand more votes he might have rounded up by campaigning in California or New York, because even if he had gotten those votes, he still would have lost all the electoral votes in those states.
Obviously, if the election was decided by the raw popular vote total, campaign strategies would be very different. Candidates would absolutely go to big states like California, because every vote there could potentially make a different. But because that's not the system we have, Trump can essentially kiss off every vote in California while fighting for an edge in Florida or Ohio.
Hillary's huge win in California is like the Yankees' 12-0 win in Game 6. It's impressive, but it doesn't count any more than if she'd won the state by one vote. Both campaigns know that these are the rules. For Trump to pour major resources into California would have been like the Pirates using all their best pitchers late in Games 2 and 3, when those games were already lost, just to try to make the scores a little closer. It would make no sense. You save your better pitchers for subsequent games in which you'll have a chance to win.
So no, Hillary's popular vote total - if it holds - doesn't mean a thing. Neither candidate is pursuing a national popular vote margin. They're both pursuing a state-by-state electoral vote majority. Trump got that. Hillary didn't. Her popular vote margin means exactly as much as the Yankees' 55-27 run total in the 1960 World Series - which is nothing at all.
By every legitimate and constitutional measure, Trump won this election. One cheer to Hillary for not making this argument this morning in her concession speech, although she only gets one cheer because Tim Kaine went out and made it for her.
By the way, if you want to see the baseball equivalent of Trump's walk-off win in Pennsylvania last night, take it away, Bill Mazeroski:
Say, why is Yogi Berra playing left field? Not that it mattered.
