It’s going on midnight on election night, and there have been a little over six million votes counted in California so far. In 2012 there were over 13 million cast in the presidential election in the state, so there are probably about another seven million to be counted. Hillary is getting a steady 61%, Trump 34%. Which means Hillary has about two million more votes coming to her out of California than will Trump. If you figure that the remaining votes left in all the other states east of here amount to maybe a million and are roughly divided equally–maybe 52% for Trump, 48% for Hillary–that means that the pile of California votes alone will give Hillary a popular vote edge of two million votes over Trump. Add in the uncounted votes from Washington state–a couple hundred thousand more Hillary than Trump–and Hillary might wind up with well above two million more popular votes than Trump.

Back in 2000, Al Gore had a little over a half million more votes than George W. Bush, while still losing the electoral college. And this year Hillary has also clearly lost the electoral college, yet her popular vote margin might be four or five times as big as that of Gore’s. Indeed, Hillary’s popular vote margin might easily be twice that of Trump’s margins in Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia and Florida combined. It might even surpass his margin in all the battleground states combined. Think of it. Hillary Clinton was probably more popular than Donald Trump in California, Oregon, Washington and Nevada than Donald Trump was more popular than Hillary Clinton in all the battleground states put together. That is something you don’t notice till long after the states have been divvied up and the electoral college numbers totaled. It’s the kind of thing you have to wait to observe, as the hours pass by and the vote totals out west inexorably climb.

I suspect that then reason that Hillary’s campaign hasn’t conceded yet is that they want to wait until those California and Oregon and Washington votes come rolling in. She wants to concede when she has millions more votes than the Donald. Because that is what everyone will talk about when she concedes, about how she received millions more votes than Donald Trump, but how he won the electoral college anyway. A rigged election, one might even say.