Categories: Stories

Donald Trump, the first sore loser to be elected President

Donald Trump will become United States president in just over a month but according to The Intercept, he is the first sore loser to be elected president because he polled on 46.4 percent of the vote and won 2.3million less votes than his rival Hillary Clinton.

If this were in Zimbabwe, which has a different electoral system, with a 46 percent vote, Trump would have been forced to go for a re-run. Worse still he would not have won the elections at all with 2.3 million fewer votes.

In Zimbabwe, a candidate has to win more than half the votes plus one, that is 50 percent plus one.

According to The Intercept what is more interesting about Trump is that when Barack Obama seemed to have won the electoral college votes, which Trump won, and seemed to be losing the popular vote, the President-Elect described Obama as the “Loser One”.

Trump wrote in November 2012: “He lost the popular vote by a lot more and won the election” and went on to blast the “phoney electoral college” system.

Sadly that was before the final count because Obama ended up winning both and with a wider margin than Clinton has over him.

The Intercept says it now seems Trump cannot stomach the fact that he won the presidency through the electoral college by just 101 052 votes but lost the popular vote by2.3 million. Trump now argues that he still beat Clinton if one discounts votes by illegal immigrants but cannot prove that.

Interesting read and argument, but it is not likely to change anything.

What is your take on this?

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This post was last modified on December 4, 2016 5:38 am

Charles Rukuni

The Insider is a political and business bulletin about Zimbabwe, edited by Charles Rukuni. Founded in 1990, it was a printed 12-page subscription only newsletter until 2003 when Zimbabwe's hyper-inflation made it impossible to continue printing.

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