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Read the news of the day in less than 10 minutes — not that we’re counting.
Though Hillary Clinton lost Pennsylvania by a smaller margin than reported on election night, the race still isn’t close enough to trigger an automatic statewide recount of the votes, according to new figures.
Nearly three weeks after the election, the City of Philadelphia has finished counting votes, including absentee and provisional ballots. Those totals significantly cut Clinton’s loss in Pennsylvania to President-elect Donald Trump, who amassed a mere 46,000 votes more than the Democratic nominee. More than five million people across the state voted in this election.
That’s a difference of about 0.8 percent. In Pennsylvania, votes must be recounted in races with margins less than 0.5 percent. A 0.5 percent margin in Pennsylvania this year would have been about 30,000 votes. Still, Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein is continuing to push for a statewide recount of the votes, and attorneys representing her will likely appear in court Monday to argue for the recount. (In PA, third party candidates Gary Johnson and Stein won 145,000 votes and 49,000 votes, respectively.)
Stein is also pushing for a recount in Michigan and Wisconsin, two other swing states where Trump bested Clinton. In the three states combined, Clinton lost by a total of about 80,000 votes.
In Philadelphia, the new totals show Trump with 108,000 votes compared to Clinton’s 584,000. Trump’s numbers in the city are significant, as he won about 12,000 more votes than Mitt Romney did in 2012, despite Philly having 7,000 fewer registered Republicans this time around. (The city in general had 3,000 more registered voters.) However, John McCain beat them both in 2008 with 117,000 votes in Philadelphia.
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Analysts expected Clinton to perform below President Obama’s margins in Philadelphia, but these totals show she held her own in Philadelphia compared to 2012. She won just 4,000 fewer votes in the city than Obama did in 2012 and there were 3,000 fewer registered Democrats in 2016 than there were in 2012. Clinton won about 11,000 votes less this year than Obama did in 2008 when there were 27,000 more registered Democrats in Philly.
