Clinton’s support was too urban concentrated

Washington — The final results of the 2016 presidential election look like this: Hillary Clinton got roughly the same number of votes that President Barack Obama received when he was re-elected four years ago, but she nonetheless lost to Donald Trump, who came in at least 2.7 million votes behind her.

That’s a highly unusual outcome — the biggest gap between the popular vote and the electoral college in almost a century and a half. Only now, with almost all the ballots counted, have analysts begun to determine what led to that result.

Start with California, where Clinton beat Trump by almost 2 to 1, amassing a margin of more than 4.2 million votes. That’s a victory more impressive than Obama’s in 2012, and it included a win in Orange County, which had sided with Republicans in every presidential election since 1936.

But Clinton’s huge majority in California was also part of her key weakness — a base of support too concentrated in the big, urban areas of the northeast and the West Coast.

A candidate gets all of most states’ electoral votes, so in the national picture, Clinton’s huge majority in California, and a similarly lopsided margin in New York, did her no good. Clinton piled up similarly “wasted” votes in some big, Republican states — notably Georgia and Texas — in which she did significantly better than recent Democratic nominees, but not well enough to win any electoral votes.

In contrast, Trump’s vote “was incredibly efficient,” said Tom Bonier of TargetSmart, a Democratic data and strategy firm based in Washington. “Where he lost, he lost big. Where he won, he won by a little. There weren’t many wasted votes. He won almost all the close ones.”

Trump narrowly won the key states he needed in the industrial belt, taking Michigan by 10,704, according to final returns, Wisconsin by 22,717 and Pennsylvania by just under 45,000, according to a compilation of the latest data maintained by David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report.