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For the First Time Since 1956! (Trump joins a very exclusive club!)

Wednesday, November 4th, 2020: For the First Time Since 1956!

Trump Loses the National Popular Vote — For the Second Time in a Row

Twenty years ago, George W. Bush lost the national popular vote, but won the electoral college.

Four years ago, Donald J. Trump lost the national popular vote, but won the electoral college.

This year, Donald J. Trump is going to lose the national popular vote, probably by over FIVE MILLION VOTES. Whether Joseph Biden or Trump will win the electoral college depends on the less than a million of the currently uncounted votes (at 9 a.m. Pacific Time, 11/4).

To win the electoral college, Trump must win the popular vote in two out of three states: Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. This looks increasingly unlikely, since Wisconsin is heading in Biden’s direction by a very thin margin, and the same is true in Michigan. I am (as if you couldn’t tell) so nervous about the outcome that I’m not certain I’ll believe that Biden won until the final tabulation plays out on Inauguration Day in 2021.

In the meantime, it can’t be said often enough:

Trump is the first presidential candidate to lose the popular vote in two consecutive national elections since Adlai Stevenson (in 1952 and 1956).

TRUMP IS A TWO-TIME LOSER.

At the top of the hour, and at every post-advertising rebooting of a media broadcast, the “talking head” should lead with the statement:

For the second national election in a row, Donald Trump has lost the national popular vote.

Again and again.

It’s particularly important the television and radio stations reiterate this so that the millions of people who supported Trump come to terms with this fact and let its significance sink in. Trump has often boosted, “I’m not a politician.” Ha! As if losing the popular vote two times in a row didn’t make that perfectly clear.

Trump’s supporters cannot dispute this fact without engaging in enormous self-deception. Some no doubt will succumb to that temptation, but as Joseph Hansen had his character David Brandstetter say, “Emotions doesn’t change facts.”

Trump has lost the national popular vote for the second time in a row. He’s not the first to do so, and it will probably be another half-century before another presidential candidate comes up short repeatedly.

If it’s any consolation to Trump’s supporters, the margin of Eisenhower’s victory over Stevenson was much larger than Clinton’s and Biden’s margin of victory. With a much smaller electorate, Eisenhower defeated Stevenson in 1952 and 1956 by an average of 8,000,000 votes.