That doesn't change the fact that the majority of Americans didn't vote for Trump. In fact, the majority of people who did vote didn't vote for Trump. Yes, he won the "popular vote", but that just means he got more votes than anyone else, not more than half of the votes.

Don't all the candidates base their strategies on the existing electoral structure? Why would he have wasted resources optimizing for a metric that isn't relevant? You don't know what the outcome would have been if he did that.

I think he actually did get more than half the votes this time.

"Staying home" is not actually a vote, as much as people want it to be in their heart of hearts.

edit: sorry, I was wrong, he did not quite clear 50% -- looked it up and he got 49.8%.