https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...eople-in-three-states/?utm_term=.c8114a1517df
Donald Trump will be president thanks to 80,000 people in three states
Three-weeks-plus after Election Day, there are still more votes to count in California than were cast in each of nine states and D.C. Most of the votes that have been (slowly, laboriously) counted in the state have been votes for Hillary Clinton, giving her a 4.1 million-vote lead in that state that's powering her 2.5 million-vote lead nationally. It takes Donald Trump's margins in the seven states where he saw the biggest vote advantages to make up Clinton's lead in California alone. (All of these figures thanks to Cook Political's
Dave Wasserman.)
But, of course, none of this matters. All that matters is that Trump got more electoral college votes, thanks to having won more states. In many cases, those wins were much more narrow than Clinton's, which also helps power the gap between the electoral vote and the popular one. Trump won 18 states by fewer than 250,000 votes; Clinton, 13.
The most important states, though, were Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Trump won those states by 0.2, 0.7 and 0.8 percentage points, respectively — and by 10,704, 46,765 and 22,177 votes. Those three wins gave him 46 electoral votes; if Clinton had done one point better in each state, she'd have won the electoral vote, too.
Or put another way: But for 79,646 votes cast in those three states, she'd be the next president of the United States. The 540-vote margin in Florida that swung the 2000 election is still the modern record-holder for close races, but this is a pretty remarkable result. (Especially since the final gap between Al Gore and George W. Bush was only a little over 500,000 votes nationally.)
http://www.weeklystandard.com/the-e...isconsin-and-michigan-updated/article/2005323
The Election Came Down to 77,744 Votes in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan (Updated)
A closer look at the three states that decided the winner in 2016.
Donald Trump owes his victory in the Electoral College to three states he won by the smallest number of votes: Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. So it's fair to say that the 2016 presidential election was decided by about 77,000 votes out of than 136 million ballots cast. According to the final tallies, Trump won Pennsylvania by 0.7 percentage points (44,292 votes), Wisconsin by 0.7 points (22,748 votes), Michigan by 0.2 points (10,704 votes). If Clinton had won all three states, she would have won the Electoral College 278 to 260. She fell short in all three, of course, and that's why we are now getting accustomed to the reality of President-elect Donald J. Trump.
