Donald Trump’s campaign manager Kellyanne Conway said Sunday the president-elect could have won the popular vote, in addition to amassing 306 electoral votes, if that was the required path to the presidency.
“Had this been a race for the popular vote, we would have won that too, because Mr. Trump would have campaigned in California, in New York, stayed in Florida, gone to Illinois, perhaps,” Conway told MSNBC’s Chuck Todd during a joint interview with Joel Benenson, a senior strategist for Hillary Clinton’s unsuccessful presidential campaign.
“We did what we were supposed to do to become president: go and campaign in those states that was so-called ‘swing states,’ ‘battleground states,’ [and] actually have an economic message that appealed to workers across the country, actually talk about patriotism, defeating radical Islam and terrorism, repealing, replacing Obamacare,” she noted.
Conway’s comments follow a tweet from Trump last weekend, claiming that he won the popular vote “if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”
Conway and Benenson exchanged sharp words during a campaign post-mortem last week at Harvard’s Institute of Politics, particularly over Trump supporters’ claims that the incoming Republican president has a mandate because he garnered more Electoral College votes than any GOP nominee since President Reagan.
“The fact is that we are the ones who understood America,” Conway said Sunday.
“The idea that he doesn’t have a mandate, when on President Obama’s watch they now lose the White House, 60 seats in the House, over a dozen Senate seats, over a dozen governorships, and over 1,000 state legislative seats, this Democratic party is having an identity crisis in a circular firing squad, and what I heard at Harvard is the same thing I hear all the time, ‘It’s [FBI Director] Jim Comey’s fault. It’s Bernie Sanders’ fault,'” she said.
Despite cruising to victory with 306 electoral votes, Trump trails Clinton by nearly 2.5 million votes nationwide in the latest popular vote count. Recount efforts launched by Green Party candidate Jill Stein are currently underway in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan — all blue swing states that Trump turned red this election cycle.
