Although Clinton received almost 800,000 more votes than Trump, according to the latest partial results, she lost in the electoral college.
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The U.S. president said he had been surprised by the Trump victory, but indicated he did not see it as a repudiation of his own policies. Clinton could win the popular vote by more than 2 million votes, according to some estimates. He lost California by an even bigger margin – 62-33 with a margin of more than 3 million votes with 70 percent of the expected vote in.
The outgoing President said Americans must guard against those trends during Trump’s presidency, and insisted he, too, would speak out against divisive language even after he leaves office.
Trump tweeted he would have won the populous states of Florida, New York and California if he had spent more time campaigning there.
Southern states with slaves were anxious about dominance by northern states, since slaves couldn’t vote and wouldn’t be counted in a direct vote.
“The next American president and I could not be more different”, said Obama, a Democrat whose last foreign trip as president comes on the heels of Republican real-estate mogul Donald Trump’s victory over Democrat Hillary Clinton in the November 8 US election.
With the USA presidential election of Republican Donald Trump laying bare frustrations and dissatisfaction in America, Obama said the impulse to “pull back from a globalized world is understandable”.
In an interview on Sunday with the 60 Minutes programme Mr Trump complained about the electoral college system, in which each state is worth a different number of votes, saying that he preferred the popular vote method. Candidates would need to campaign for every single vote, which means they would need focus their efforts on the entire nation. “But I do feel a responsibility as president of the United States, to make sure that I facilitate a good transition and I present to him, as well as the American people, my best thinking, my best ideas about how you move the country forward”.
With Republicans now in control of both congressional houses, it’s unlikely Boxer’s bill will become much more than a political statement.
In that unlikely event, Congress would then send the matter to states for ratification by three-fourths of state legislatures within seven years.
Each US state is given a number of electors, which corresponds to the size of the state’s population.
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There is certainly momentum right now to scrap the Electoral College, “but it’s unlikely to succeed”, said Derek Muller, associate professor of law at Pepperdine University. We have to deal with issues of economic dislocation.
