who won the popular vote in 2012 us presidential election
United States presidential election, 2012 Obama defeated Romney, winning a majority of both the popular vote and the Electoral College. Obama won 51.1% of the popular vote compared to Romney's 47.2%. Obama was the first incumbent since Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1944 to win reelection with fewer electoral votes and a lower popular vote percentage than had been won in the previous election, and was also the first two-term president since Ronald Reagan to win both his presidential bids with a majority of the nationwide popular vote.
United States presidential election, 2016 Voters selected members of the Electoral College in each state, in most cases by "winner-takes-all" plurality; those state electors in turn voted for a new president and vice president on December 19, 2016.[a] While Clinton received over 2.8 million more votes nationwide, a margin of 2.1%, Trump won 30 states with a total of 306 electors, or 57% of the 538 available. He won two perennial swing states which typically decide an election, in Florida and Ohio. Trump also won three "blue wall" stronghold states that had not gone Republican since the 1980s: Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. He also won Maine's 2nd congressional district, which had also not been won by a Republican presidential candidate since 1988. Leading up to the election, a Trump victory was considered unlikely by almost all media forecasts. After his victory was assured, some commentators compared the election to President Harry S. Truman's victorious campaign in 1948 as one of the greatest political upsets in modern American history.[14][15]