Turnout Matters

To become President of the United States, a candidate must garner at least 270 electoral votes.  In 2016, Donald Trump put together 304.

Of those, five came from "faithless electors",  that is, individuals who changed their vote after the fact.  That left Mr. Trump with about 300 "real" electoral votes.  46 of those were distributed across Wisconsin (10), Michigan (16), and Pennsylvania (20), and represented about 77,000 popular votes.

These states offered 46 electoral votes because the three contain an aggregate of 46 Congressional districts.  They also contain a much larger number of precincts  .  It's been estimated that there are well over 174,200 voting precincts in the United States, each of them serving about 900 voters.  That makes sense to me.  For instance, within a two-mile radius of my home, in what used to be the PA 7th and is now mostly the PA 5th Congressional District, there are four precincts.

Now for some arithmetic.  In 2016, across the three states we've been discussing, we can assume, given the data just noted:

1. an approximate average of (174,200 / 46), or 3800,  voting precincts
2. therefore, an approximate average of 4.22 votes per 900-voter precinct 

That's the stuff of nightmares.  It means that, but for about four votes in every precinct in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, we'd have been spared more than two years of demagoguery, fear-mongering, white nationalism, and xenophobia.