Final answer:
If a candidate has more popular votes but less electoral votes leads to them losing the election.
Step-by-step explanation:
In the United States, the president is elected through the Electoral College, where each state is allocated a certain number of electors based on its population.
The candidate who wins the majority of electoral votes becomes the president, regardless of whether they received more popular votes or not. This is how candidates can win the popular vote but lose the election, as we have seen in several instances in the past.
For example, in the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton received about 2.8 million more popular votes than Donald Trump, but Trump won the electoral vote and became the president.
This discrepancy happens because the winner-take-all system is used in most states, where the candidate who wins the most votes in a state gets all of that state's electoral votes. So, if a candidate wins smaller states by large margins and loses bigger states by narrow margins, they can end up with more popular votes but fewer electoral votes.