It’s absolutely wild to me that, with the benefit of 2020 hindsight, we’re still drawing conclusions about the public based on the fact that the person who earned by far the most votes of any candidate in the race still technically lost the election.

For people who pride ourselves so much on understanding how systems work, we’re consistently really bad at understanding this one.

Maybe public opinion in the US is fickle or uninformed. Maybe it’s not. Either way it’s not reflected in the US political landscape, for the simple reason that the US political landscape reflects many things more consequential than public opinion.

I agree the electoral college is not as good as a general public vote, however one counterargument to "side A won more votes than side B!" is that, both sides knew the rules ahead of time so if the rules were a general vote, then the campaigns would have been different so side B may still have won in that case. We will never know.

This is a particularly important counterargument when talking about the 2016 presidential election, since Clinton seems to have been the only candidate who was actually trying to win the popular vote. She put a bunch of campaigning resources into places like California which would increase her popular vote share but wouldn't affect the result. Trump's campaign, on the other hand, was by all accounts focused on simply getting enough electoral college votes to actually win. This was pretty obvious from their respective postmortems in the press.

The idea that a particular candidate was cheated because they won a symbolic but politically irrelevant victory that the competition wasn't even trying for is not a particularly good argument. In fact, it's positively Trumpian; he famously used the "popular vote" argument to discredit Obama's victory.

> Clinton seems to have been the only candidate who was actually trying to win the popular vote. She put a bunch of campaigning resources into places like California which would increase her popular vote share but wouldn't affect the result.

What Clinton was trying to do was not so much “win the popular vote” but “maximize down-ballot coattails associated with an expected electoral victory” (and, thereby, assure that members of Congress of her party felt thet owed her.)

It's perhaps worth remembering that inability to marshal support from Congressional reps of his own party, particularly it's liberal wing, is what handed her husband two stinging early embarrassments (one of which was defeat on an issue she was the face of): the lesser being NAFTA passing with strong Republican support but widespread and strong Democratic opposition, and the greater being the humiliating defeat of Clinton's signature campaign initiative, health care reform.

Bill Clinton did pave the way for HMOs. They were a punt, but it was progress in reducing healthcare costs.

> Bill Clinton did pave the way for HMOs.

How? I rather thought that Nixon (or Ted Kennedy, the principal sponsor of the bill) did that with the Health Maintenance Organization Act of 1973, the federal law that required employers with 25 or more employers to offer them if they offered traditional insurance plans, almost 20 years before Clinton took office.

What Bill Clinton did do after he big health reform failed was HIPAA.

> For people who pride ourselves so much on understanding how systems work

There's some irony in admonishing people for not understanding systems, while simultaneously failing to understand the electoral college. That's the system that decides who becomes president.

> It’s absolutely wild to me that, with the benefit of 2020 hindsight, we’re still drawing conclusions about the public based on the fact that the person who earned by far the most votes of any candidate in the race still technically lost the election.

You're forgetting that we're not as a single, monolithic country; we're designed to be a union of (mostly) independent states. It is those state who select the head of the executive however they see fit individually. There is nothing stopping a state from issuing electoral votes by percentage and not by winner-take-all.

Since the Civil War and especially with the expansion of the commerce clause, we don't act quite like (mostly) independent states any more, but those basic premises and rules are still there. To be honest, the system works much like it's intended to -- the rural/agricultural states maintain some power even though since they're rural there are fewer people. This isn't inherently bad; however, I'd argue that making the number of people represented by a single representative essentially unlimited instead of having a bounded maximum like initially designed is the root of our problems. It's possible for states to gain or maintain population and loose representatives and electoral votes under the current system, which is the main issue.

> most votes of any candidate in the race still technically lost the election

> For people who pride ourselves so much on understanding how systems work, we’re consistently really bad at understanding this one.

Well, CA seems to have understood that what matters is opinions across enough states to win the Electoral College vote. As you said, it's a system. They optimised for the system that exists.

Even if a majority voted for Clinton, there's enough discontent across the US that Trump won the election quite decisively (304 to 227 electoral college votes). Anyhow, look at the current landscape. Warren + Sanders make up nearly 50% of the Democratic primary polls and their popularity seems to be growing as others drop out and as we get closer to actual voting.

Looking a just the total of electoral votes ignores the razor thin margins a lot of those states were won by. I wouldn't call that decisive.

Among left-leaning circles there is an overwhelming feeling that the "Overton window" has shifted way too far right -- especially on things like regulation of business. Bernie Sanders is popular specifically because he shifts that window back to the left. From a deregulatory standpoint, I'm not sure Trump is significantly worse than Clinton. He's definitely worse, but the difference is smaller than Clinton vs Sanders; they're both in the pockets of the corporate overlords.

The far-left wing of the Democratic party felt that 4 years of chaos under Trump was an acceptable tradeoff in the long-term for moving the party (and the country) to the left on the economy. So they stayed home on election day and made the race close enough for Trump to win. In the current climate, moderates are going to find themselves left out in the cold in national races -- exactly because moderates are relatively easy to pull to one side or the other via targeted campaign advertising.

> The far-left wing of the Democratic party felt that 4 years of chaos under Trump was an acceptable tradeoff in the long-term for moving the party (and the country) to the left on the economy.

No, all the polling and other research I've seen showed that non-Clinton supporters on the left (particularly Sanders supporters) supported Clinton more strongly on 2016 than Clinton 2008 supporters supported Obama. What people (largely because it conflicts with the simplistic linear left-right model where people vote for whoever is nearer their position on that line that so many people have internalized as how US elections work) is that Sanders polled substantially better among the disaffected independents, rural working class whites, and other demographics outside of the Democratic liberal base (and even outside of the Democratic Party at all) than Clinton did. Those are the people that, whether by voting the other way or just not turning up to vote at all the way they might have for a candidate that offered them something to turn out for, that made the difference.

> In the current climate, moderates are going to find themselves left out in the cold in national races -- exactly because moderates are relatively easy to pull to one side or the other via targeted campaign advertising.

Moderates aren't easier to pull, people whose variation from the political center isn't along the main axis of variation between the parties are easier to pull. That's not the same thing as moderates.

re: “ And anti-establishment opinions are still popular (Warren and Sanders are 2 of the 3 Democrat front-runners) despite media messaging.”

I really find it shocking how extremely biased outlets like MSNBC are in favor of pro-corporations candidates like Clinton, Biden, etc. I very rudely mock my friends who are Democrats and who swear by what the paid shills on MSNBC do to negatively cover any candidate who does not tow the corporate state party line. Of course, it is the same for the rare republican candidates like Ron Paul who also are not paid shills for the corporate state.

All the cable networks are owned by major corporations that use them to serve their interests. This shouldn't be shocking.

Of course, you are correct.