Popular Vote Update: Latest Numbers for Trump, Clinton Come In

By Jack Phillips
December 20, 2016 Last Updated: December 21, 2016
Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. (Mark Wilson/Getty Images--TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP/Getty Images)

Democrat Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes over Republican President-elect Donald Trump.

Specifically, the Cook Political Report, in its latest update on Tuesday, said Clinton won by 2,864,974 votes.

Trump won 13 swing states by 816,128 votes, Cook’s data showed. In non-swing states, Clinton won by more than 3 million votes.

The Cook Political Report’s editor Dave Wasserman also tweeted that all U.S. states and Washington, D.C. have certified their election results.

However, Trump won the Electoral College vote, with electors casting their ballots on Monday to confirm his victory with little difficulty. Trump will be sworn in on Inauguration Day, which is Jan. 20, 2017—President Barack Obama’s last day in office.

Trump won 304 electoral votes, as compared with Clinton’s 227 votes. Five Democratic electors voted for third parties, while two Republican electors did the same.

Other candidates—which include Green Party Candidate Jill Stein and Libertarian Candidate Gary Johnson—took approximately 5.7 percent of the popular vote, according to the Cook Report.

Trump and others have said he would have won the popular vote if that system were in place to determine a presidential election.

He suggested that his campaign would have been planned differently. Instead of focusing on relatively low-population swing states, he would have focused on high-population states such as California, New York, Texas, Florida, and Illinois.

The psychological effect of having no Electoral College could also impact the behavior of voters in states that lean Republican or Democrat. It has been argued that the incentive to vote is diminished in states where voters believe or can expect that their votes are less likely to have an impact on the outcome.

Clinton is the second Democrat to lose a presidential election and win the popular vote in the past 20 years. In 2000, Democrat Al Gore lost to Republican George W. Bush the same way, winning the popular vote by more than 500,000 votes.