We won by 3 million votes.

I don't know about all that speculation otherwise, but both of Obama's wins had the same number of Republican votes and way more Democratic voters. The real problem was that Hillary was a terrible candidate overall, let alone against a populist. All she had to do was get people to vote against the crazy talking guy, and she couldn't even do that.

It's not about raw numbers, it's about ratios, and winning the game by using the rules. If you're playing a game, and the rules state you need Y points to get X points, but it's the most X points that win, you're going to maximize X point gain, not Y point gain, as any extra Y points are useless. That's all they did - they "gamed the system" by playing by the letter of the rules.

Seriously, though, lay off the speculative language and ad hominems if you want to be taken with any measure of respect. For instance, REUTERS showed that 96% of people that voted for Trump are still supportive of him... so it's hard to make your claim that it's dwindling. In Fact, us liberals are just as susceptible to confirmation bias as anyone, so don't think that conservatives don't have views based in facts - the problem really is that they do, just their leaders are willing to lie.