I was thinking this morning about what it would take to ashcan the electoral college once and for all. And something I hadn’t considered being the trigger point dawned on me:

The two times it’s happened in living memory, nobody won an actual majority of the popular vote. In 2000 Gore was at 48.4% and in 2016 Clinton was at 48.2%. So, imagine a scenario where a major party nominee gets 50.3% of the national popular vote but loses the electoral college…

It could have happened in 2000, even without flipping Florida. Pull a few votes from Nader in California, New York, Texas, Massachusetts, and a couple of other states, Gore might have been able to eek out a majority.