california didnt matter because trump took texas, florida, pennsylvania, ohio, michigan, georgia, and north carolina. thats 7 out of the 10 states that have the most electoral votes, so he essentially played the game correctly.

the issue with the electoral college is that it does give states like ny, texas, and california a disproportionate say in the election. technically it only takes a minimum of 12 states to win the election, and while that may seem like total horse shit to those living in less populated areas (whose states should also have a say in how things go), its slightly better than the 9 states who contain over half the population controlling everything through popular vote.

my personal opinion is the system is fucked and breaking up electoral votes based on state by state voting percentage is the best way to go about things. you cannot go purely off popular votes alone otherwise we run into the issue of all states who dont have massive populations getting no say in the election, or consideration from the already elected who might want to run for re-election. if we stick with the current system, then we have people continuing to feel as though their state is completely under-represented and forgotten about due to the massive amount of votes other states have by comparison. remember we are a democratic republic, and all members of the republic should have some kind of say for how the leader of the republic is elected

to use an analogy i really like to explain it; youre the superintendent for a very small school. the school has 4 classrooms and 7 teachers. 3 classrooms have 1 teacher in them, and a larger classroom contains 4 teachers. the school needs to have an election amongst the teachers to elect a new principal. if you go based on popular vote alone, then all candidates will focus solely on the one larger classroom, since that is all they need to win (4/7 possible votes). the other 3 classrooms could be completely ignored with the children left to rot basically and the principal wouldnt care as long as the one large classroom was still voting for him. the alternative is you give the large class room 2 votes total, and each smaller classroom gets 1 vote. now you have a total of 5 votes, with the only way to win either being get all the small classrooms on board while ignoring the large classroom, or getting some combination of the large classroom and small classroom to vote for you. either way, this system means that all classrooms must be considered and attended to in order to win the vote, not simply the biggest and the strongest.