Lawrence O’Donnell: ‘Trump Did Not Win a Majority of the Vote’

O’DONNELL: “Once again, Donald Trump did not win a majority of the vote. Cook Political Report tells us Donald Trump captured about 77.3 million votes, 49.8%, to Kamala Harris’s 75 million votes, 48.3%. 1.5% winning margin for Donald Trump. Another 1.7% of the vote went to other candidates, with almost 3 million people voting for other candidates for president. So once again, most American voters voted against Donald Trump. In the end, the 2024 election was decided by 229,766 votes across Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Joe Biden’s record-high vote count in 2020 of 81 million votes for president remains the most votes ever won by a presidential candidate in American history. Of course, the number of voters constantly increases as the population increases over time, so former presidents who actually won in huge landslides, like Ronald Reagan, Lyndon Johnson, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, could not have possibly won as many votes as even losing candidates do now because of the voting population at that time was so much smaller. Post-election polls show voters in conflict with themselves. 79% of voters said lowering prices of goods and services was their top priority. 52% of voters said they favored new tariffs on goods imported from other countries. 59% of voters said that new tariffs on goods from other countries would generally make the prices of the things they buy higher. The Congressional Budget Office agrees with those 59% of voters who said new tariffs would increase prices. The Congressional Budget Office estimates the new tariffs Donald Trump has proposed would cost American families an average of $1,560 a year.”