California alone still has at least 527,500 uncounted ballots, according to figures from the California Secretary of State's office as of November 30. With Clinton continuing to win more than 62 percent of the vote there, the California ballots alone will likely be sufficient to put her total past Obama's figure of four years ago. If she passes Obama, Clinton will have received the second-highest raw number of votes of any candidate in American history, with only Obama in 2008 doing better.
In addition, her absolute margin of popular vote victory — that is, the percentage of the vote by which she leads Trump — is already better than the winning margin achieved by 10 elected U.S. presidents, according to historical totals compiled by the U.S. Election Atlas.
Nine of those elected presidents — excluding Trump, who has technically not been elected yet and won't be until the Electoral College votes on December 19 — are:
John Quincy Adams, 1884, lost popular vote by 10.44 percent.
Rutherford B. Hayes, 1876, lost popular vote by 3.0 percent.
Benjamin Harrison, 1888, lost popular vote by 0.83 percent.
George W. Bush, 2000, lost popular vote by 0.51 percent.
James Garfield, 1880, won by 0.09 percent.
John F. Kennedy, 1960, won by 0.17 percent.
Grover Cleveland, 1884, won by 0.57 percent.
Richard M. Nixon, 1968, won by 0.7 percent.
James Polk, 1844, won by 1.45 percent.
As of the evening of November 30, according to Cook Political Report numbers, Clinton's 65,145,375 total votes were 1.9 percentage points better than Trump's 62,623,869. That figure puts Clinton just 0.17 points behind an 11th elected president, Jimmy Carter, who in 1976 defeated incumbent President Gerald Ford by 2.07 percent.
Clinton leads Trump by 2,521,506 votes.
The nearly unprecedented scale of Trump's popular vote loss to Clinton is compounded by the fact that the current president-elect also won the Republican nomination with only 44.95 percent of the total votes cast in the party's primary elections.
In the 12 presidential elections since 1972, when the current primary process went into effect, only five of the 24 major-party nominees have lost more than 50 percent of the popular vote in both the primaries and general election.
Only one of those candidates has actually been elected president — Donald Trump.
