Chris

Everyone in the USA is obsessing about the popular vote as if they never knew about the electoral college.

The college acts to give slightly greater weight to the votes of people living in smaller states who might otherwise be ignored as candidates concentrated their campaigning and their policy offerings on the relatively few areas of high population density across the states. Both candidates were fully aware that it was college votes they needed to win, and targeted their campaign resources accordingly.

Had the aim of the game been to win the highest number of ballots cast, then they would have played it by those rules. But that wasn't the game, and that's not how they played it.