Someone tells HRC that when Bill ran, he lost the 'popular vote' in both elections

No one got more votes than Clinton, but it was only a plurality not a majority.

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96,277,634 votes cast in 1886
47,401,185 votes for Bill Clinton
48,876,449 votes against?

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Hmmmm...Bill Clinton is a vampire?

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No one got more votes than Clinton, but it was only a plurality not a majority.

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And yet in '92 there were 15M more people that didn't want him to be president than did, and he still was sworn in

C’mon man this makes you look pretty petty, Clinton got the MOST votes of any candidate. So he was the most popular

1886

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And Clinton beat the next closest challenger by more than 5 percentage points in both elections.

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But unlike state elections, there was no runoff. And people still accepted that. Because we all knew the EC rules. That's kinda a huge point, one would think

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Clinton got the MOST votes of any candidate. So he was the most popular

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No he wasn't. In '92, if he would have been forced into a runoff, the sitting president trounces him



And we never hear from those 2 again. But, EC rules say no runoff. That went for Bill, and those same EC rules apply to Trump, too. But states want to try to change their rules after Trump won, but not after Bill got shellacked by 15M votes. Odd

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votes against

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I didn't know this was an option. You're really reaching with this argument.

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votes against

I didn't know this was an option

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I find it the only option in most elections.

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He doesn’t win in ‘92 without Perot. Fact.

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Nate Silver and other "experts" dispute this and claim to have solid data to back them up. But I think they are full of it and I agree with you. Just look at Perot- folksy, populist, nativist America-first type of guy, anti-Nafta, and basically old-arse and conservative-sounding white dude. And he's from Texas. Who could that be hurting, really, OTHER than Bush?

Here is a link to Silver's "film" on the topic which he says "makes clear" he is right. I find this very hard to believe.

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For what it's worth I find this a lot more convincing:

LINK

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From all of this, you might see an argument forming that Perot did, in fact, cost Bush re-election. But the claim here is actually significantly weaker. Instead, the best we can say is that we don’t know, and cannot know. There is significant empirical evidence, briefly outlined above, that Perot did not cost Bush the election, but that evidence all comes from the universe where Perot actually ran. If Perot fundamentally reset the terms of the 1992 election, then this evidence cannot answer our actual question. Put differently, you simply cannot unwind the millions of choices – some made by voters, some made by campaign officials – that were occasioned by the entry of a billionaire candidate who drew 19% of the vote, and, at one point, almost 40% of poll respondents. Yes, these voters may have indicated that they would have split evenly between Bush and Clinton, but that is only after a campaign of listening to Perot’s critiques and elevation of the deficit as an issue; at best, this only suggests what might have happened had Perot not appeared on the ballot on Election Day. Yes, these voters may be demographically similar to Clinton voters, but that is only after Perot had broken many of them away in the first place (and they are ultimately dissimilar in an important way: They didn’t vote for Clinton). It’s also entirely possible that none of this mattered. Had Perot not run, Clinton still would have appeared on MTV, still would have played the sax on “Arsenio Hall,” still would have had a good convention, and still would have had solid debates. Most importantly, the economic recovery still would have lagged. If forced to choose, that is probably where I come down. But it is also possible that, absent Perot, Clinton would not have had an opportunity to find his footing, his sax playing would have looked desperate, and the fact that we were, in fact, in a recovery would have mattered more. We cannot not know. Of course, all of this is ultimately beside the point; it is a debate over legitimacy that expired almost 20 years ago. But even then it was a silly debate. Elections are often driven by contingency, and the validity of Clinton’s presidency is no more dependent upon the effect of Perot than Reagan’s was on the fact that the recessions of the early ’80s didn’t drag on an extra six months. Presidents who win a majority in the Electoral College are the presidents, period, and they are no less legitimate if a third party candidate does play spoiler.

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