Hillary Clinton only needed to switch 53,650 voters to win

Trump got 6.6 million votes in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. If Hillary had only convinced 53,650 of them to vote for her instead — the victory could had been hers.

Let’s look at the states Trump won by the smallest difference of votes::

With 228 electoral votes so far, she only needed 42 more to win (38 with NH). Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan would have given her 46 — and the world would look different today.

It’s outstanding how few votes decided these states. If only less than 34,250 voters had switched in Pennsylvania, and only less than 13,650 had switched in Wisconsin, and less than 5,750 had switched in Michigan — she could have been the United States 45th president.

What’s unforgivable here is how little Clinton did to win these states. I’m no expert, but I know one thing: Hillary Clinton didn’t make a single stop during the general election campaign in Wisconsin.

The most dangerous data is unquestioned data.

If only Hillary’s team had questioned the data that told them that they didn’t need to campaign in these states, we could have said that at least they tried. But Wisconsin is the best example of what happens when data remains unquestioned, driving decisions away from the needed path.

How-to

Base data from a .csv compiled by David Taylor.

Imported into a Google sheet with a cell function:

Imported into BigQuery from the sheet with this trick:

Query to find the state smallest vote differences:

#standardSQL

SELECT *

FROM (

SELECT *, SUM(t_delegates) OVER() Trump, SUM(c_delegates) OVER() Clinton FROM (

SELECT a.electoral_votes e_votes,a.votes-b.votes diff,

REGEXP_EXTRACT(a.geo_name, r'2016 (.*) Pres') state,

a.delegates t_delegates, a.votes t_votes,

b.delegates c_delegates, b.votes c_votes

FROM `fh-bigquery.sheets.presidential_general_election_2016` a

JOIN `fh-bigquery.sheets.presidential_general_election_2016` b

ON a.geo_name=b.geo_name

WHERE a.name='D. Trump' AND b.name='H. Clinton'

))

WHERE diff BETWEEN 0 AND 100000

OR (c_delegates IS null AND t_delegates IS null)

ORDER BY t_delegates DESC

Bonus: Where Hillary and Donald did better and worse than their senate counterparts