Last updated on July 17th, 2023 at 09:33 pm
As ballots from last week’s presidential election continue to be counted, Hillary Clinton’s lead over Donald Trump just keeps growing. The former Secretary of State now leads the president-elect by an astounding 1.4 million votes.
According to nonpartisan Cook Political Report’s latest tally, which is continuously being updated, Clinton has so far earned 62,916,638 to Trump’s 61,547,058.
Clinton’s growing lead over Trump is only giving oxygen to longshot efforts by some Democrats to pressure the electoral college to choose Clinton as the next president when they officially cast their votes on Dec. 19. One petition pressuring the electors has nearly 4.5 million signers.
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Clinton’s unprecedented popular vote lead over Trump is bigger than John Kennedy’s was in 1960 and Richard Nixon’s in 1968, when those two men went on to become president. Trump’s popular vote percentage also falls short of the failed presidential campaigns of Mitt Romney, John Kerry, Al Gore, and Gerald Ford.
With as many as 4 million votes left to be counted in California and Utah, not only could Clinton’s lead surpass the 2 million mark, but she could also close in on Barack Obama’s 2012 vote total of 65,915,795, which gave the current president an easy victory over Romney and four more years in the White House.
Not only did millions more Americans choose Clinton to be their next president, but a clear majority of voters cast their ballot for somebody other than Trump. The president-elect’s supporters may claim that last week’s election results translated to a mandate for their candidate’s agenda, but if anyone received a mandate last week, it was Clinton – by a sizable margin that just keeps expanding.
As the raging dumpster fire known as Trump’s transition process continues to burn and Clinton’s popular vote lead grows to unprecedented levels for a losing candidate, perhaps it’s not such a bad idea for the electors to consider their options before voting next month.
Sean Colarossi currently resides in Cleveland, Ohio. He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in Journalism from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and was an organizing fellow for both of President Obama’s presidential campaigns. He also worked with Planned Parenthood as an Affordable Care Act Outreach Organizer in 2014, helping northeast Ohio residents obtain health insurance coverage.
