What will have more an "IMPACT" for Election 2016: The Popular Vote or Electoral College?

Electoral vote. The popular vote is meaningless. The electoral college is under no obligation to pay any attention to it.

The popular vote is merely a mechanic for determining who the Electoral College will "Pledge" their votes to. In reality it means very little, however mechanically when you have states with between 6M and 60M people, it becomes a big deal because not every vote ends up being worth the same.

This is a product of the "winner take all" methodology in many/most states.

The issue that happens is when you have a State with a large population (and hence LOTS of EC votes) which is "evenly divided" compared to a State with a small population but little political division.

As an example, Let's say the State of Orange has 30 EC votes, but only 60% is voting for the Red party. The red party still gets all 30 votes in most cases. Compare that with the State of Banana, who has 12 EC votes, but votes entirely Blue. If each EC vote was 100k People, that would tell us 1.8M people voted Red, and 2.4M voted Blue, however because of vote "pledging" and "winner take all" Red wins.

This is why "Swing States" are so important in an election. You are able to get a solid chunk of EC votes, without swaying a lot of the population.

Using Red & Blue again, to make the election go to Blue, we would need 11% of the population of Orange to change their vote (which is 3+ votes, but actually returns all 30). If this were a Bell Curve, you are trying to get States that neither have the minimum (1) or the maximum (55), because it's just too hard to sway that much of the population. But... by focusing on the middle of the Bell Curve you are able to "rack up easy points" compared to hard ones.

So using the State of Mango (55 EC votes) as an example, shifting 11% of that population is 550K votes, whereas shifting Orange 11% is only 300K votes. Rather than go after a single large state, it is more beneficial to go after several mid size states.

But that merely explains why the EC v. Popular vote functions the way it does, not why it's important. The major problem with using a straight Popular votes system is that it puts "disproportionate weight" on major city centers, or States that house those city centers. In the US that would mean NYC, Dallas, LA, Chicago. Rather than forcing campaigns to be spread out throughout the country, they would be VERY tightly focused on only the most heavily populated areas.

The EC fixes that, however "winner take all" creates a different complexity.

Based on past elections the Popular vote seems to mean squat! The electoral vote will have the most impact.