For the last time, the popular vote doesn’t matter. Donald Trump won the election whether he won the most votes or not.

You can try to cling to whatever gives you hope, but at the end of the day, he and Hillary Clinton played in a system that has existed for about as long as our country.

Occasionally there are times when the winner of the popular vote will lose the election. This happened once in 2000 and once this year. It has negatively affected Democrats on both occasions, but there is nothing underhanded, nothing nefarious about the results themselves.

Again, it’s a system both parties know going in. The design is to get the entire country involved in having a say so. Without it, the two candidates could simply visit four states and beg for as much of the popular vote as possible.

The rest of the country would be forgotten, and that’s no way to build a country. You would have legislation and spending efforts focused mostly on California, Texas, Florida, and New York.

Most everyone else would end up feeling even more disenfranchised than they do now, and that should scare anyone who hates Donald Trump especially if you’re honest about the actual reason he was elected.

If people can be so disenfranchised when they do have a say, what would they be capable of if they had no say whatsoever? Far worse in all likelihood. And again, that is no way to build a country.

Clinton’s popular vote lead over President-elect Trump now stands at 2,357,260, according to figures released by AP. https://t.co/Kl3wlCVoHK pic.twitter.com/RdBlLWK7cB — ABC News (@ABC) December 1, 2016

The popular vote also ignores a point I’ve harped about in the past that bears repeating. Electoral college votes inspire a different form of campaigning than do most popular vote elections.

Hillary ran her campaign like she was in a popular vote election. She neglected the heartland in order to maximize turnout in states she had already won and likely would have won without really trying.

She also spent $212 million more than Trump did to do it. Her final popular vote tally will be around 2.5 million more. Hats off to her, but that’s a whole lot of cabbage for not much ROI.

Clinton spent around $7.38 per vote. Trump spent $3.96. The only two things he would have had to do to win a popular vote election: spend the same as Clinton to boost turnout in the high population centers, still likely losing California in a landslide but securing enough additional votes to get over the hump.

And if you think, taking Trump’s rate of return into consideration, that $212 million extra in spending wouldn’t have boosted his numbers, well, you don’t understand basic economics very well.

The troubling thing about this: Trump has a very clear argument he would have won the popular vote if that had been the rule of the game, yet he hit the voter fraud argument of which there is zero evidence at least on a broad enough scale to change the existing popular vote.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand he could have easily won looking at the data. Why go there?

At the same time, the smart people on the left know they would have lost a popular vote election by skimming the data. However, they continue to throw out the #NotMyPresident idiocy that Bill Maher so expertly shut down after the election.

Together you have both major parties undermining the results of a legitimate election. And that’s not something many democracies can survive.

But what do you think, readers? Is it time to shut up about the popular vote, accept the results, and move on? Sound off in the comments section below.

[Featured Image by Gage Skidmore/Flickr Creative Commons/Resized and Cropped/CC BY-SA 2.0]