What If Hillary Clinton Won in 2016?

Her coalition would have fractured

What if the anachronism of the Electoral College was done away with before the 2016 election, and the popular vote winner, Hillary Clinton, were allowed to serve as president?

Trump lost the popular vote by more than 2 million votes in 2016. Bitter divisions from perceiving him to be an illegitimate president made that election result difficult for Democrats to accept. Yet the Electoral College legitimized him among his followers though he lost the popular vote.

And the hyper-partisan bitterness would have continued if Hillary became president.

Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.): “If Hillary Clinton becomes president, I am going to do everything I can do to make sure four years from now, we still got an opening on the Supreme Court.” He joked about her getting shot if she became president.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, the Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, pledged that if Hillary won the 2016 election and if a Supreme Court opened up, the Senate would wait until after the 2020 election to fill it.

House Republicans Preparing Years of Investigations of Hillary Clinton (Washington Post, October 2016)

Perhaps one reason alternate history is so popular is that many Americans, in the “era of Donald Trump,” feel they are living in an alternate history or a parallel universe. They read the NYT and thought articles like this from April 2016 were reliable: Electoral Map is a Reality Check on Trump’s Bid.

They feel Trump could not have possibly won the presidency fairly in a rational world…but in our timeline he somehow did, by fluke, hook, or crook while losing the popular vote by millions the first time, and by what exactly the second time? He won an outright majority of 50 percent.

So how would the world be different, or surprisingly similar, if Hillary Clinton won in 2016?