It’s a simple question, with an equally simple, accurate answer: Democrats merely needed to contrive a way to hold on to a few of those states that went for Obama in 2012, but that switched into Trump’s electoral column in 2016.

The American left’s ongoing denial of last November’s reality -- Hillary Clinton won the popular vote but still managed to lose the presidential election -- has prevented many of Donald Trump’s adversaries from asking what is, for them, the really important question: What might have produced a different outcome?

The electoral gap that finally separated the candidates, after all, was exceedingly narrow. A swing of just 38 electoral votes would have put Hillary in the White House. With that shift, the final electoral tally -- 306 for Trump to 232 for Clinton -- would have been reversed to the magic 270 for Hillary to 268 for Trump.

This outcome was eminently within reach. Indeed, it is the very plausibility of the election breaking entirely differently that has fueled the search for the covert shenanigans - Russian hacking, anyone? -- that Clinton’s supporters insist cheated her of what was a sure thing. Had the Democrats managed, for instance, to hold on to just three of the vaunted “blue wall” states that voted for Barack Obama -- Pennsylvania with 20 electoral votes, Michigan with 16 and Wisconsin with 10 -- they would be back in control of the executive branch.

All three were bitterly contested, and ended up in each case breaking for Trump -- barely -- by around one percent of the total number of votes cast. He carried Pennsylvania by 53,292 (out of a total of nearly six million), Wisconsin by 27,257 (before the recount), and Michigan by just 10,612. Had Clinton been able to round up 90,000 more voters properly distributed in these three crucial states, Donald Trump would be hosting reality TV, and Hillary Clinton would be in the White House.

Instead, Hillary just managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. And Democrats might well be asking, “What happened to our voters?”

And the most accurate answer to that question might well be “They were dead. They were aborted as part of the savage ‘reproductive rights’ strategy your party pursued for the last five decades.” And, to be even more specific, the answer would mention the role that Planned Parenthood, the Democratic Party’s most intolerant, radical, and well-organized constituent interest group, has played in promoting and providing abortions among those who were statistically most likely to have been Democratic voters, American racial minorities.

Before dismissing that response as mere provocation or sensationalism, it is worth looking at some of the startling numbers. First, however, a caveat: data collected on abortions -- customarily described as ‘abortion surveillance’ -- are neither conclusive nor complete.

In the first place, not all states require that abortion providers submit reports to state health authorities, and those that do require abortion reporting (46 of the 50) are not required to turn those reports over to federal data collection agencies. Health authorities in some states, notably California, have been so embarrassed by the racial disparities in abortions that they quit releasing information on abortions altogether.

Furthermore, what are generally accepted as definitive abortion data reports are derived from statistics turned over voluntarily to organizations like the Centers for Disease Control (technically neutral, but in practice vigorously pro-abortion) and the openly pro-abortion Alan Guttmacher Institute (AGI), a supposedly independent organization that just happens to be named for a former president of Planned Parenthood and that was long described (accurately) as ‘the research arm of Planned Parenthood.’

So, there are lots of holes in the data on abortion, particularly as regards race of the woman seeking the abortion, and, if there is any inherent bias stemming from the predispositions of the data compilers, it must be assumed to be one that minimizes the disparate racial impact of abortion.

Thus, what follows is a ‘best guess’, based on data collected in irregular ways from organizations committed to maximizing the frequency of abortion. Total abortion numbers represent an averaging of the data provided by the two major ‘abortion surveillance’ groups. Which makes the results even more startling.

Let us examine just the case of Wisconsin, and unpack some abortion data for the years from 1973 to 1998, that is, the quarter century from Roe v. Wade to the last year of birth for voters eligible to cast ballots in 2016.

In those years, Wisconsin health authorities reported a total of 421,465 abortions on residents (overall numbers are larger, including a small number of abortions performed upon out-of-state visitors). While abortion rates by race have fluctuated over the decades, they have always been significantly higher for non-white women than for white women. The most recent national data on abortion and race from the CDC show that Hispanics accounted for 19% of abortions, blacks for 36% and whites for 37%. In other words, a significant majority of American abortions are performed on non-white babies.

Applied to Wisconsin, that means that in the 25 years under consideration, abortion providers can be projected to have eliminated 151,740 black, 80,085 Hispanic, and 155,955 white potential voters.

If they had shown up at the polls in November and followed national polling averages regarding candidates and racial preferences, 88% of the blacks would have voted for Hillary and 8% for Trump, 65% of the Hispanics would have voted for Hillary and 29% for Trump, and 58% of the whites would have voted for Trump compared to 37% for Hillary.

In other words, had those babies been protected rather than aborted, had they all shown up to vote (admittedly a stretch) and if national patterns of abortion by race and voting by race held true, Trump would have netted an additional total of about 125,000 black, white and Hispanic voters to add to his 2016 total. Hillary would have gained a net of just shy of 243,000 additional black, white and Hispanic voters.

Added to their respective vote totals of November (1,409,467 Trump vs. 1,382,210 Hillary) Clinton would have carried Wisconsin by a total of 1,625,201 to 1,534,467, or more than 90,000 votes.

If the same scenario is applied to Trump’s narrow wins in states like Michigan or Pennsylvania, where the percentage of black and Hispanic voters is considerably higher than in Wisconsin, the conclusion is inescapable: The Democrats themselves, in their role as the obedient legislative lapdogs of Planned Parenthood, pursued policies that aborted Hillary out of ‘her shot’ at the White House. By successfully producing in the United States one of the world’s most inhumane and unregulated systems of abortion law, they ensured the success of their opponents.

In some ways, the bitter loss of the election is thus an entirely fitting piece of retributive karma, giving Planned Parenthood and the Democrats a just reward for their diabolical policy of promotional campaigns, legal activism, and clinic site selection intentionally designed to maximize the incidence of aborted pregnancies among minority populations. How many clinics does Planned Parenthood operate in majority white suburban communities? The answer is fewer than one in five. “I’m grateful for my abortion!” Planned Parenthood billboards proclaim in majority black neighborhoods in Cleveland. One has to wonder what audiences, apart from affluent, white, female SJWs, that bizarre message resonates with.

It would be easy for pro-life Americans to take a certain degree of smug satisfaction from these developments, but that response, however tempting, is deeply misguided. What we witnessed in November represents, in part, the electoral consequence of a catastrophic tragedy. However hopeful the legislative and judicial opportunities produced as a result of America’s pitiless abortion laws, what we need to remember always and above all is the irretrievable human loss they have produced.

There is this to hope for in the future, however. Not all Democrats are blind to what they are doing to themselves. Witness the ongoing intra-party squabble about whether or not the party should support pro-life Democrats. Thus, partisan self-interest may one day achieve that which moral objections about the abomination of our abortion laws has not: The Democrats may break from their blind subservience to the abortion industry, if for no other reason than to stop the continuing suicidal extermination of large chunks of their own electoral base. And that, achieved even on the basis of the most tawdry of motives, would be a victory for the forces of life and liberty.