Trump got the most GOP votes ever — both for and against him — and other fun facts

But should lovusa4 have meant to say that Trump got the most primary votes of any Republican he or she would have been correct. That's one of the five interesting nuggets about primary voting that we can now report, with nearly all of the voting complete.

To wit:

1. Trump got more more votes in a Republican nominating contest than anyone on record.

The previous record for most votes for a Republican in the primaries was held by George W. Bush in 2000. Trump blew that out of the water.

(Notice that the top vote-getter wasn't always the nominee. In 1952, Robert Taft won more votes than Dwight Eisenhower. In 1968, Ronald Reagan won more than Richard Nixon.)

2. But Trump also had more votes against him.

The giant field of Republican candidates meant that votes in the early primaries were split widely, making it hard for anyone to cobble together a majority. It also appears to have meant that more people came out to vote. So it's not a surprise that Trump also set a record for the most votes cast against the top vote-getter -- or that he won a lower percentage of votes (the pie charts) than anyone since Reagan in 1968.

3. Hillary Clinton got more votes when she lost in 2008 than she got this year, when she won.

To the point about how fiercely contested contests boost turnout, when Hillary Clinton ran against Barack Obama in 2008, the two each got more than 17 million votes. (They also had a strong third candidate, John Edwards, in the race early on.) This year, with a still-hard-fought-but-not-as-close contest, turnout was down.

Turnout was down for the Democrats versus 2008 in nearly every contest. We created this chart last month; it includes most of the contests from this year.

4. Regardless, Clinton won the popular vote by a wide margin.

The graph above uses estimates from RealClearPolitics which largely excludes caucus results. The Post has looked at the total margin between the two, including caucus results, which we've now updated for Tuesday's contests.

Excluding North Dakota, where few people voted but for which the state party hasn't yet released numbers, Clinton has earned about 3.8 million more votes than Sanders.

Sanders won a lot of states with not very many votes, which is why he trails in the popular vote (and lost the pledged delegate race).

5. Overall turnout between the two parties was about even.

This is a surprising one, noted by Cook Political Report's David Wasserman.

For the first few months, the story of the campaign was about how Republican turnout was up from 2012 and Democratic turnout was down from 2008. That's true, and it held.

But comparing total votes between the two contests was marred by the fact that big, heavily Democratic states didn't vote until the end of the contest. New York voted in late April. California and New Jersey voted just this week.

We only have rough estimates for total vote, but using the U.S. Election Atlas's tallies for the Republican and Democratic contests, the totals are 28.9 million and 29 million, respectively. With D.C. still to vote on the Democratic side.

There are a lot of caveats to this, including that there are more Democrats than Republicans. But while turnout was down for the Democrats since 2008, about the same number of people headed to the polls as on the GOP side.

Both parties, though, had < the MOST VOTES FOR PRESIDENT in the history of the USA. Important to remember that, too.