A new election tally shows that Hillary Clinton is leading President-elect Donald Trump by 2 million votes as of Nov. 23, more than two weeks after Election Day.
Clinton, a Democrat, lost the Electoral College vote after Trump clinched 270 votes.
Clinton netted 64,223,958 votes, as compared to Trump’s 62,206,395 votes, says Dave Wasserman of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, as reported by Politico.
On Tuesday, Trump told New York Times reporters in a meeting that he would “rather do the popular vote” and wasn’t “a fan of the Electoral College.” He said as much in a 2012 tweet after Republican Mitt Romney lost to President Barack Obama, saying it was a “disaster for a democracy.”
After Election Day this year, Trump tweeted: “The Electoral College is actually genius in that it brings all states, including the smaller ones, into play. Campaigning is much different!”
Last week, he doubled down in tweeting that “if the election were based on total popular vote I would have campaigned in N.Y. Florida and California and won even bigger and more easily.”
Reince Priebus, the president-elect’s chief of staff, described Trump’s victory on Nov. 8 as an “electoral landslide.” He added, “The American people agreed that Donald Trump’s vision for America is what this country has been waiting for,” according to ABC’s “Good Morning America.”
Two weeks after losing the presidential election, @HillaryClinton was spotted at a Rhode Island bookstore. https://t.co/jeZ5E9FYup pic.twitter.com/lSH9RKh73Y
— HLN (@HLNTV) November 23, 2016
Several members of the Electoral College are now trying to block Trump when they convene to vote. According to the New York Post, six Democrats on the Electoral College will abandon voting for Hillary Clinton to vote for a Republican other than Donald Trump in the hopes that Republican electors will join them in keeping Trump under 270 votes.
They would have to persuade 37 Republican electors to defect. Even if that succeeded, however, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives could simply opt to elect Trump.
“If no candidate receives a majority of Electoral votes, the House of Representatives elects the President from the 3 Presidential candidates who received the most Electoral votes,” according to Archives.gov. “Each state delegation has one vote. The Senate would elect the Vice President from the 2 Vice Presidential candidates with the most Electoral votes.”
During the 2000 election, Al Gore beat George W. Bush by about 500,000 votes—but Bush won the Electoral College.
