@neony:
1. Structurally, this can happen because a) Most states (all except Maine and Nebraska) award all of the electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote in their state and b) states with smaller populations are overrepresented in the electoral college. The latter is because the number of electors for each state is 2 (the number of senators) + the number of representatives (which are proportional to population.) Therefore, by winning a large number of smaller states, a candidate can end up with a majority of electors even though they may have fewer total votes.
2. The "swing states," as they are more commonly called, are states that don't reliably vote for the president from a particular party. For instance, California and New York can be expected to vote for the Democratic candidate while Texas and Georgia can be expected to vote for the Republican candidate. Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio (the three largest and probably most frequently mentioned of the swing states) have a more even split between Republicans and Democrats and therefore can "swing" from one party to another from election to election. Other states often considered swing states include Virginia, North Carolina, Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, New Hampshire and Colorado.
Great explanation. I would add that California has 36,000,000 citizens plus another 11,000,000 illegal immigrants totaling 47,000,000. Without getting into a complicated analysis of that. California desperately needs illegal immigrants to harvest their extremely vast crops, and to work off the books as nannys, gardeners, maids, and other labor intensive jobs. Additionally, people tend to move to California when they are drug addicts and want a banquet of all the drugs they want. SO, when someone like Trump comes along threatening to enforce the already existing immigration and drug laws, the people of California go nuts - and do whatever they can to prevent that. For instance, in California and a few other states that all voted for Hillary, they decided to legalize marijuana for medicinal purposes. Without debating the medicinal benefits of marijuana, lets just assume that marijuana has legitimate medicinal use. In that case, like all other medicines, it should be a controlled substance because it has effects on the brain, and on pain. It' obviously not just some inert harmless substance. But then they decided to legalize it for recreational use.. which contradicts it's classification as being a medication. Honestly, I'm glad that things like marijuana and lotteries get legalized, because they are virtually a tax upon stupid people.
With that said, Trump KNEW that he had zero chance of winning California, so he never wasted any of his time or money campaigning there the presidential election. California is a very corrupt state, and carry's 55 of the 538 total electoral votes in the country. Therefore, any election that a democrat won by less than 55 electoral votes was determined by crazy California. That means that JFK and Jimmy Carter would never have been president if not for crooked California. In fact, in the case of John F. Kennedy, we now know that he did NOT win Illinois, and therefore his election was illegitimate.
One more thing which gets ignored is 3rd party candidates. The best example of that was the election of George H.W. Bush vs Bill Clinton. Although the electoral votes make it look like Clinton easily beat Bush Sr. That is not true. 3rd party candidate Ross Perot got a huge number of votes that would have otherwise gone to Bush. Perot effectively split the republican votes between himself and Bush. If Perot was not on the ballot, Bush would have won that election EASILY.
If Republicans were smart, they would fund black and female 3rd party candidates to split the democratic votes.
A final comment.. all politicians are power mad, deceptive, two-faced, control freaks. If they were not, they would not even get on the ballots. The USA is screwed. There is no way Trump will make America Great Again. Trump will keep the USA going strong for a couple of decades before it fades into being just another country like all the rest - such as happened to England, Germany, Spain, Japan, Italy.. all of which used to be major super powers. Very few people are aware that Italy ruled England 1600 years ago.
