A fact that has comforted many Hillary supporters is that she won the popular vote. Some have gone as far as to cite this as the reason why the Electoral College should pick Hillary Clinton on Monday. This proposition faces many challenges, but a glaring one is that 29% of Americans think that Donald Trump won the popular vote. A recent poll by the Pew Research Center expands on this statistic. 7% of responders who identify as Democrats believe that Trump won the election compared to 24% of Independents and a whopping 52% of Republicans.
This baffling data set hints at the challenges in our political system that we still have to overcome. People who believe that Trump won the popular vote cite the debunked claim that Hillary only won the popular vote because disenfranchised groups like undocumented immigrants and convicted felons somehow cheated the system and voted for Hillary. Although there are many credible news sources that debunk this, evidently, a majority of Trump supporters attribute this to “liberal media bias” and look the other way.
Have we reached this point as a country? Where even though a political figure offers no basis for his claim, millions of his followers still blindly accept what he says as fact. Any free-thinking American who values democracy should be astonished and dismayed. Our political system is dying, and we have to take measured, effective steps to bring it back to life.
