I've said it enough: It's not a good indicator that the candidate has excited his voter base, when you compare two different elections. I have no clue what you're on about.
The strawman you are jousting is the notion that popular vote doesn't indicate the winner. It certainly doesn't, regardless of the correlation. It never indicates the winner. Then you'll want to argue that somehow a campaign where resources are sent to battleground states would have the same popular vote count as one that had national media spots and large, high population cities only conventions, as if the "winner takes all" concept vs national popular vote doesn't in any way alter how a campaign manager runs the campaign.