The Washington Examiner has a truly great column from Michael Barone:
They're still counting the votes, going on four weeks after the election, in California. In Brazil, a nation with much more challenging geography, they manage to do it in five hours.
The seemingly endless dilly-dallying of California's (presumably union-represented) public employees has obscured two interesting things about this year's presidential election.
The first is that the Electoral College loser Hillary Clinton won a plurality of the popular vote by a considerably wider percentage margin than her counterparts in the elections of 2000 and 1888, Al Gore and Grover Cleveland — though apparently less than the percentage margin for Samuel Tilden in 1876.
The second is that for the first time in the nation's history the most populous state was a political outlier, voting at one extreme in the national political spectrum.
There's more:
California was 14 points more Democratic than the nation this year, versus 10 points in 2012, 9 points in 2008, 6 points in 2004 and 2000. In the nine elections before that and after California passed New York to become the most populous state in 1963, the average of California's Democratic and Republican percentages was never more than 5 points off the national figures. In four of the five elections between 1964 and 1980 (the exception was the McGovern year, 1972) it actually voted more Republican than the nation as a whole.
You'll want to read the entire article... twice.
