Donald Trump’s loss of the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by 2.8 million votes is being read wrongly by political savants, by partisan Democrats, and by Trump himself. Democrats say it means that they and not Trump have the national mandate; Trump is blaming it on voter fraud, which is entirely ludicrous; and some are saying the split presages an era of divided vote totals, in which the 2000 and 2016 elections repeat themselves endlessly, not sensing that each of these contests had had discrete and distinctive particular elements that are unlikely to surface again.

2000 was “The Perfect Tie,” as James W. Ceaser and Andrew E. Busch say in their book about it, in which the entire country was split down the middle. Not only were the 537 votes by which George W. Bush won the endless number of Florida recounts and the 536,000 popular vote margin (out of 100 million votes cast) won by Al Gore inside any conceivable margin of error, but the levels of parity continued all the way down.