The vote was almost dead even. If you though Trump was going to win big then you were just as wrong as the places that predicted a big Clinton win.
About as big as I expected, although not quite as big as I hoped, then again, there are always surprises in Presidential elections. I didn't expect Trump to get Pennsylvania (or Toomey to win), I expected Russ Feingold to win (yesterday saw a report on the general issue of Team Hillary ignoring/taking for granted the Rust Belt, including ignoring a plea for help from Feingold), and one of the biggest surprises is that Minnesota truly was in play (margin looks to have gone from ~200K in 2012 to ~40K).
If two countries play a best-of-5 soccer games, and one beat the other 3-0 with three consecutive 1-0 games in the last minute. It would have been hard to claim that one team isn't obviously better and the margin of winning is small.
Your analogy is flawed. The individual "games" weren't that skewed. Instead, imagine two basketball teams play best-of-5. The scores are 100-98, 101-99, 100-101, 99-100, and 98-100. It would be bizarre to say that one team was greatly superior based on that, even though they did have a big margin in percentage of games won.
On further reflection, I do agree that the election was close. I'm guessing my previous response was conditioned on Trump being the underdog, arguing on a different point you were making.
Your "most logical analogy" still isn't quite right. The individual scores for each game were very close, and the total scores actually slightly favor Clinton. But Trump won more games, after weighting the games in a certain way. But I don't know how to do it better, I don't think there's any sport that's really played anything like this!
I'd say the best measure for closeness would be either how much of a shift in the overall vote was needed to flip the result, or how much of a targeted shift could generate a change in the result. In this case, an overall shift of 1-2% would have changed the result, and a targeted shift of some tens of thousands of votes could have. It's not the closest election ever (2000 probably takes that prize by these criteria) but it's fairly close compared to, say, 2012 and 2008.
Except, for, you know, who administratively runs the country for the next 4 years, has the bully pulpit and therefore potentially great influence over the Congress, etc. etc. etc.?
It sure seems to mean a whole lot based on all the sad faces and rioting in the streets I've seen over the last few days.
And, circling back to the real point, it's the rules of the game, claiming some sort of greater meaning only when your side loses the popular vote is beyond pointless.
To remind you, my point is that the election was very close. It is not that the result is bogus or nobody cares or it's meaningless.
A tiny shift in sentiment would have changed the outcome of the election. The fact that the margin of electors is about 14% doesn't change that fact. The electors are not a meaningful measure of how close the race was.
>..a 1% shift from Trump to Clinton would have resulted in her victory.
Here's an excellent analysis from five-thirty-eight: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-a-difference-2-perc...
Or maybe AP calls it if a candidate concedes? Guess we'll just have to wait, and for California, they've got over 4 million absentee ballots to count....
The only example I've heard of where "Ah, fuggit" kicks in is when enough ballots have been counted that the absentee ones can't change any race, and the extra labor is not considered to be worth it.
It would take an exceptional, once-in-a-generation, beloved Republican to win states like California, New York or Massachusetts, and I don't think Trump even tried there. Just the margins of victory in those three states are around 1/12th of Clinton's entire vote total.