This election has been rife with paradoxes, chief among them the discrepancy between the popular vote, which Hillary Clinton won by 2.8 million votes, and the electoral college, where Trump won 304-227. Meanwhile, President Obama retains the overall record of 69.5 million votes in 2008. Bush’s previous record, set in 2004, of 62.04 million votes. This is the fourth time this has happened, the others being. With his 62.98 million votes, he narrowly defeated George W. Trump won the 2016 US presidential election with fewer popular votes than Hillary R. Trump’s victory also makes him the highest vote earner of any Republican candidate ever. The opposite pattern, Clinton - Obama - Romney - Trump, only appears in 5 areas, all of them on the coasts: California, Virginia, Massachusetts, Maryland and the District of Columbia.

The most common ordering, showing up in 15 states, was Trump - Romney - Obama - Clinton, which reflects the trend highlighted above of Trump improving upon Romney’s performance and Clinton receiving fewer votes than Obama. I also ranked the four candidates’ popular vote totals in each state to see if I could spot any patterns. We can summarize the Trump-Romney and Clinton-Obama comparisons in one map where we see, predominantly, dark red indicating Trump held onto Romney’s victories and improved upon them, while Clinton was unable to match Obama’s popular vote totals in many states.

2016 popular vote totals by candidate