On too many social media posts Iâve seen some people unfamiliar with our voting system ask âhowâ Biden could have won - âLook at all those RED states! Way more than BLUE!â Those outside the US: I get it, it can be confusing. Those who live here? Well... (please educate yourself she says out of the side of her mouth). I can NOT explain the archaic electoral college system to you (mostly because Iâm choosing not to - and did I mention the no sleep?) but basically each state is treated individually no matter their total population or total voting population. See, a LOT of those red states are NOT full of PEOPLE - at least farrrrrrr less than many of those blue states. (Hereâs where the electoral college numbers come in to help âevenâ representation out, and blah blah blah.) Hereâs a comparison: I live in California - that blue state way over to the left. Now we donât look the largest in land mass but Californiaâs population is greater than the COMBINED total population of the 22 smallest US states - by over 2.4 MILLION. Each one of these California CITIES - Los Angeles, San Diego, San Jose, and San Francisco - is larger than the population of these US STATES - Wyoming, Vermont, North Dakota, and Alaska. The population of the CITY (not county) of Los Angeles is larger than ANY of the 23 smallest US states. Los Angeles is also the biggest COUNTY in the US - with a population larger than 43 of the 50 US states. Worth repeating: the population of a single California county is larger than 43 of the 50 states. âBut what about Texas?! It looks huge!â It is - in land mass, but the population of California is 48% larger than that of Texas. Heck, you could throw the population of Ohio - the 7th largest state in the nation - into Texas and their combined population is still over a half a million smaller than Californiaâs.
Anyways, when you see that map with all that RED remember: BLUE won this election. :::flips off the electoral college and high-fives the combined BLUE votes in EVERY state - so far over 5 million MORE âblueâ votes than âredâ:::