Popularity Contest

In “Hearing the People” (January 22), a generally spot-on assessment of how Republicans should react to populism, Henry Olsen writes: “The combined might of the five core groups of movement conservatism had been unable to win a presidential election since 2004, and has carried the popular vote in only one presidential election since the fall of the Berlin Wall.” Analysts who paint a dire picture of the GOP’s prospects love to quote popular-vote results, but it’s like saying which team got more hits in a baseball game: mildly interesting but ultimately meaningless. The presidential popular vote is a crude …