Reminder: Hillary Clinton Received Three Million More Votes Than Donald Trump

I had thought we’d be through with postmortems of the November 2016 election after a few months, but that was apparently wishful thinking. That postmortem is here to stay. The DNC was disorganized and ineffective, Democrats have forgotten how to talk to working class voters, Hillary wasn’t able to trump up passion and excitement, and on and on it goes. There’s one thing, though, that I feel like has gotten lost in all of this.

Hillary won the popular vote. She received nearly three million more votes than Trump did.

Three million is nothing to sneeze at, either. That’s the same margin George W. Bush won by in 2004. And consider this: Of the past seven presidential elections, Republicans have won the popular vote exactly once. Once! It is only the electoral college that has allowed Republicans to take the presidency in three of these seven elections. And yet, the postmortem conversation I see taking place seem to suggest that the Democratic party is a stone’s throw from complete ruin. Not so!

Let’s look at Congress. There are 435 individuals in the House of Representatives. Of these, 235 are Republicans and 194 are Democrats. That’s a big margin! It’s also somewhat misleading. Of all ballots cast in all House races nationwide in 2016, Republicans won 49% and Democrats won 48%. If House seats were awarded proportionally to the popular vote, the House would be made up of 213 Republicans and 209 Democrats. That the makeup looks so different is part an accident of geography and demographic quirks, and part the result of intentional gerrymandering.

What about the Senate? Senate terms are six years, so Senate elections aren’t held in every state every year. Because the composition of each state varies, looking at the total Senate votes cast in a single year may not give you a full picture. I don’t say this because Democratic senatorial candidates received fewer votes in 2016; they didn’t. They actually received 11 million more votes than did Republican senatorial candidates. I say that the votes cast in a single year may not give you a full picture because the makeup of the states up for Senate elections each year can differ significantly (consider Senate elections in California, for example).

In order to examine what has been going on in the Senate, I pulled up the Senate results from 2012, 2014, and 2016, and combined the popular vote and wins and losses for all three. The result? Over the course of those three elections, Democratic senatorial candidates won eighteen million more votes than Republican senatorial candidates. Meanwhile, Republicans won 54 races while Democrats won only 47.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t be asking ourselves questions, as Democrats, in the wake of 2016. We absolutely should be. I’m just not sure we’re currently asking the right questions. Could we improve our messaging? Of course! But when it comes to the popular vote, Democrats aren’t actually doing all that terribly. The problem seems to have more to do with some combination of demographics, geography, and how our electoral system is set up. We need to find ways to achieve greater success within those constraints—but that is a conversation I do not see happening.

The postmortem conclusion appears to be that Hillary was a bad choice for the Democratic nomination. Given that she lost, I’m not going to disagree. My concern is that in focusing on failure, and on things we’ve done wrong, we’re forgetting to look at our successes, and at things we’ve done right. We didn’t lose the popular vote in 2016. Democrats picked up six House seats and two Senate seats. Democrats still ended up with a minority in both houses, of course, but this focus on doom and gloom has gone so far I’m wondering whether anyone remembers that Democrats picked up any seats at all. I had forgotten until I went to write this post.

Yes, we’ve experienced a setback. There is no denying that. Still, yesterday’s Democratic sweep in Virginia should remind us that all is not lost. A more productive postmortem would focus less on the past and more on the future. How can we improve our messaging? How can we improve our get out the vote messaging? How can we foster good candidates? And, importantly, how can we ensure that redistricting is done fairly? We have good ideas, passionate activists, and interested voters. Let’s build rather than tearing down.