Donald Trump won the election. That's a fact. But since then, Trump, his supporters and even some pundits are making various claims about his victory that aren't true, starting with his Orwellian assertions to have won in a landslide or even recording "one of the biggest Electoral College victories in history."
Here are a few other real facts about the president-elect, the election and public opinion.
1. With almost all ballots finally counted, Hillary Clinton won the "popular" vote -- that is, the total number of votes cast -- by more than 2.8 million, about a 2.1 per cent edge over Trump's tally. This is a larger gap than the one in the 2000 election, when Al Gore won about a half-million votes more than George W. Bush did. John Kennedy in 1960, Richard Nixon in 1968 and Jimmy Carter in 1976 were each elected president with a smaller percentage lead in total votes cast than Clinton's lead over Trump. In 2004, Bush beat John Kerry by only 2.5 pe rcent of the vote.
No, winning the popular vote doesn't have any legal standing at all. We shouldn't pretend otherwise. But it does mean that claiming the voters were demanding Trump or the programs he favoured is dubious at best.
2. Trump's Electoral College margin, 306 to 232, was below the average spread. Nate Silver has the details at the FiveThirtyEight website, ranking Trump's victory eighth out of the last 10 elections. A uniform 1 per cent swing to Clinton would have given her Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and the presidency. Trump won those three crucial states by a total of less than 80,000 votes.