It’s 2:10 AM and I couldn’t sleep. I was thinking: How many Americans live in blue states vs red states according to Nate Silver’s Who will win the presidency? map?

There were other things flowing through my head that had nothing to do with the 2016 election, but when I decided to get up and attempt to wear myself out so I could go back to sleep, this is what I decided to do: tally the populations of the blue vs. red states.

I’m sure there will be Trump supporters, if they can read above 3^rd grade level (the grade level for this post is 8.2 and it will take 2.29 minutes to read this post according to readablity-score.com), who will disagree with Nate Silver’s 2016 Election Forecasts, and that’s okay. They probably don’t know that Nate Silver’s track record for calling elections is close to 100%.  In addition, Nate Silver says that the further out from an election we are, the higher the odds are that his forecasts could be wrong. In addition, Silver doesn’t rely on just one reputable poll, he looks at all of them from regional to state to national and runs those numbers through an algorithm 20,000x each time (for Trump’s supporters: computers crunch numbers much faster than humans using their fingers and toes) to come up with forecasts that can change several times a day.

Anyway, after counting the populations of the 28 blue states on Silver’s forecast map, the total was about 211 million (66.3 percent of the population) with 107 million (33.6 percent) living in red states.

I know that there will be Trump supporters in every state, but that doesn’t matter. What counts is the 538 Electoral College votes (hover your curser over Silver’s map to discover how many Electoral Votes each state has), and if the majority of voters in a state go for one candidate most or all of the Electoral College votes go to that candidate.

I suspect that this is where Trump, if he were reading this post, would pull one of his ignorant Trumpism lies and Tweet out that it was corrupt and unconstitutional for 538 people to decide who the next president was going to be, because he and most of his supporters probably have no idea that this is what the American Founding Fathers wrote in the U.S. Constitution back in the 18^th century when they were deciding what type of government we’d have.

Then there is the fact that Georgia and Arizona are clearly battle ground states and Hillary could lose them by the time November rolls around.  But those two states only have about 16.6 million people, and that still leaves the blue states with about 61 percent of the U.S. population.

Nate Silver is probably biased in favor of Hillary Clinton, but that doesn’t change the numbers unless he’s manipulating them.  And he wasn’t manipulating the numbers when the Forecast, soon after the GOP convention, favored Trump to win by a small margin.

That was something that changed after the Democratic convention and Trump’s attack on the parents of a fallen American Muslim hero who sacrificed his life for his troops in Iraq back in 2004 when G. W. Bush was president. Did you know that Trump’s campaign blamed the death of Army Captain Humayun Khan on the policies of President Obama and Hillary Clinton? Obama was elected president four years after the captain’s death.

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Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran, with a BA in journalism and an MFA in writing, who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).

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