Forget fake news and alternative facts, statistics tell election story

You can learn a lot from statistics.

I can read a box score from a baseball game and determine what happened without reading the story that goes with it.

I can set up a spreadsheet for the family budget that tells me automatically how much money I have left over to spend. Usually, this is somewhere in the neighborhood of $0.

And I can look at final results from the 2016 presidential election and write an entire essay on why Donald Trump won, why Hillary Clinton lost and why we need to do away with the Electoral College. It goes like this:

Since the night of November 8, when I fell asleep with Hillary Clinton rising toward the glass ceiling and woke up with Donald Trump as president-elect, I have been looking around for someone to blame for this insanity. When I read that only half of the country’s voting age population bothered to cast a ballot last year, I thought I had my villains.

A closer look tells me it isn’t quite that simple.

It’s acknowledged that Trump won the election by carrying three states that had been written off as part of Clinton’s “blue firewall” – Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. However, Trump didn’t win those states simply because voters didn’t show up. He won them because a lot of voters did.  

According to StatisticBrain.com, turnout for all three of those states among voting age adults was significantly higher than the national average of 51%. It was 60% in Michigan, 59% in Pennsylvania and 65% in Wisconsin, and a slim majority of them voted for Trump, giving him the 46 electoral votes he needed to win. It makes me wonder what would have happened if Trump voters hadn’t turned out in force, or if Clinton had campaigned harder in those states instead of writing them off as hers.

That said, a better turnout by Clinton supporters (or Bernie Sanders supporters, more likely) could easily have kept those three states from turning red. Trump only won Michigan by 11,600 votes, Pennsylvania by 68,200 and Wisconsin by 22,700. Of course, it’s too late for that now.

Statistically speaking, it’s also interesting to note that in West Virginia, where Trump was a guaranteed winner, only 49% of eligible voters cast ballots, and turnout was similarly low in other states where the outcome was predetermined, such as deep blue California (43%), District of Columbia (54%), Hawaii (37%), New York (51%), Kansas (52%), Tennessee (51%), Oklahoma (52%) and Texas (50%).

If you voted for Clinton in West Virginia or Trump in California, you knew going in that your vote wouldn’t count toward the election of the president, which was decided in the Electoral College. Everyone accepted the fact that Clinton had no chance in West Virginia and Trump could never have won California, which no doubt accounted for the low voter turnout.

Now that we know that Clinton received almost three million more votes than Trump, is there any question that the Electoral College needs to be abolished? I mean, a lot of people like me would like for our votes to actually mean something before we die.

For other stats geeks like me, here’s a chart that shows some interesting election numbers:

2016 Presidential Election Statistics
	Michigan	Pennsylvania	Wisconsin	Nationwide
Total voting	4,650,000	5,975,000	2,925,000	128,843,000
Voting age pop.	7,754,185	10,146,780	4,502,492	251,107,404
% voting	60%	59%	65%	51%
Registered voters	7,431,589	9,737,690	4,295,057	231,556,622
% voting	63%	61%	68%	56%
Clinton votes	2,268,193	2,844,705	1,382,536	65,853,625
% of registered	30.5%	29.2%	32.2%	28.4%
% of votes cast	49%	48%	47%	51%
Trump votes	2,279,805	2,912,941	1,405,284	62,985,105
% of registered	30.7%	29.9%	32.7%	27.2%
% of votes cast	49%	49%	48%	49%
Margin	11,612	68,236	22,748	2,868,520
% voting age pop. not voting	40%	41%	35%	49%