??? -- Given the margins that can effect a win and the electoral-college impact, the two to three million vote differences among the popular vote each man garnered is material, thus not qualitatively "about the same," even though in the abstract, the quantities would in many other situations and discussions be fairly considered "about the same."
GOP popular vote totals
- 2008 McCain popular vote --> 59,948,323
- 2012 Romney popular vote --> 60,933,504
- 2016 Trump popular vote --> 62,984,825
Yeah, but given the growth of the electorate, that isn't as big of a difference as you think.
The more probative number is percentages.
McCain got 45%
Romney got an ironic 47%
Trump got 46%.
So as a PERCENTAGE they stayed in the same range. The idea that we need to fight really hard to get one percent of the electorate that isn't going to change its mind, anyway, is silly, and this is the argument I have with Mac that he never, ever responds to.
MEANWHILE
Obama got 55% in 08
He got 52% in 12
and Hillary got 48% - you know, the people still voted for her, and she'd be president if we didn't have this awful system devised by Slave Owners.
so Trump didn't perform better than Romney, in percentages, Hillary performed a lot worse than Obama, about 4-7% worse. And where did those 4-7% go?
Well, Gary Johnson got 3.28% and Jill Stein got 1.07%. That accounts for 4% of it.
I don't know where the votes came from. I know from where they may have come and I haven't seen in your argument anything that indicates cogently they came from none of those sources. The first source for them and which folks wanting to argue for the conclusion you are is that they result from more people voting for someone for POTUS and Trump was the candidate for whom those "new voters" chose.
Except- again, he didn't get any improvement in raw numbers. If you drill down deeper into the numbers, he got 58% of the White vote compared to 59% for Romney, but he got 30% of the Hispanic Vote compared to 29% for Romney and 8% of the black vote compared to 6% for Romney.
In short, in terms of percentages, the needed didn't move for Trump. It moved quite a lot for Hillary, whether it be her general unlikability, the fact the media poured mud on her for years, all the way up until the election, or people thinking, "Well, this country can't possibly be stupid enough to elect Trump through an archaic system devised by guys who went home afterwards and had non-consensual sex with their slaves, so I'll vote for some weirdo who has promised me he won't smoke dope".