A Thing I Did Not Know This Morning

President Bill Clinton did not get a majority of the vote either time he was elected.

Put another way:  More people didn’t vote for him than did.

Huh.

9 responses to “A Thing I Did Not Know This Morning

  1. True – in one election it was Perot; can’t remember the third party in the other?

    But we can also say that in both years, the majority of people who voted, voted for Clinton.

  2. This must make George W. Bush less legitimate (he didn’t even win a plurality of votes in 2000) and Barack Obama more legitimate (he won with just under 53 percent of the vote in 2008).

    BTW, Perot was the third-largest vote-getter in 1992 & 1996.

    • This must make George W. Bush less legitimate (he didn’t even win a plurality of votes in 2000)

      Well, to the degree that Dubya was illegitimate, that stays the same. I am certainly uncomfortable with a President winning the election without also winning the popular vote.

      and Barack Obama more legitimate (he won with just under 53 percent of the vote in 2008).

      I’ve never question Obama. And to be honest, I’m glad he won by as much as he did. It would have been horrible to go through that whole vote count thing again.

      I simply didn’t know that clinton never got 50% + 1.

  3. the majority of people who voted, voted for Clinton.

    I don’t think so.

    In 1992, 44,909,000 voted for him.
    In 1992, 58,000,000 voted against him.

    In 1996 it was much closer. But again, Clinton didn’t even get 50% of the vote.

    • Math was never my strong suit. What I SHOULD have said was of those who voted, he got the most votes of the THREE candidates. My bad.

      I had completely forgotten that Perot ran both times.

  4. Well, we elect Presidents through the electoral college, so that’s what matters. Gore beat Bush by more than Kennedy beat Nixon in terms of popular votes, but that doesn’t matter. I like the electoral college because it makes state battles important. I’m not sure how it would alter the contest if it were straight popular vote, but from a purely voyeuristic horse race perspective elections would be less interesting!

  5. You know it was a damn shame that a bunch of old geezers in a Democratic controlled precinct were too old and decrepit to know how to vote. And no matter how many times we recounted we could not make the answer come out right in Florida 2000. But we learned from our mistakes and learned how to count so that when Al Franken ran for Senator the votes showed up where and when they were needed.

    • But we learned from our mistakes and learned how to count so that when Al Franken ran for Senator the votes showed up where and when they were needed.

      HA!

      I’m from Minnesota and so was horrified that we would act like that. Jeepers he needs to be out of office.

  6. Bush and Franken both won fair and square, no matter how much people on the other side of each try to claim otherwise.

    Franken is perhaps one of the smartest Senators there, and has earned respect from friends and foes alike — he simply knows his stuff and he’s good. That’s what the right tends to hate about him. That doesn’t mean he’s right, there are smart people on both sides of the aisle. He just happens to be one of the brightest on the left side.

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