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Hillary Clinton Got More Votes In Cook County Than Obama Did In 2012

By Tanveer Ali | December 5, 2016 12:26pm | Updated on December 7, 2016 10:34am
 Hillary Clinton got 176,000 more votes in the 2016 presidential race in Cook County than Chicago's favorite son Barack Obama got in the 2012 race.
Hillary Clinton got 176,000 more votes in the 2016 presidential race in Cook County than Chicago's favorite son Barack Obama got in the 2012 race.
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CHICAGO — Hillary Clinton got 123,000 more votes in the 2016 presidential race in Cook County than Chicago's favorite son Barack Obama got in the 2012 race.

In 2012, Obama won 1,488,537 votes in Cook County, or 74 percent of the county's total share. Last month, Hillary Clinton got 74.8 percent of Cook County ballots garnering 1,611,946 votes.

RELATED: Maps of how Chicago voted in the 2016 and 2012 presidential election

The increase came both in the city and the suburbs, which gained a total of 300,000 more registered voters between the 2012 presidential election and the 2016 one. (About 206,000 of that was in Chicago alone.)

"One of the things that I think has been true is that voter registration has been increasing," said Dick Simpson, a political science professor at University of Illinois at Chicago. "There are more potential voters in terms of the greater number of votes."

Simpson also noted how politics this year were different than in 2012. The suburbs turned more blue, he said.

"Cook County was different this time because there are more Democrats now," Simpson said. "The congressional races in the entire ring of suburbs around Chicago has begun to turn Republican to Democratic."

The city, which in 2012 voted 84 percent for Barack Obama and 14.6 percent for his Republican opponent Mitt Romney, voted 83.7 percent for Clinton and 12.4 percent for Republican Donald Trump this year.

"83 percent is an extraordinarily high number," Simpson said. "I think part of that is the immigrants community and the women's vote was especially anti-Trump."

h/t The Atlantic 

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