You are wrong. First of all, any election where you use "popular vote" to determine the winner is pretty much by definition a popularity contest. I don't see how you could define it any other way, and I don't see how calling it a "popularity contest" makes it a bad thing. It simply is. However, the President is not elected based on popular vote. The president is elected based on the votes of 538 people known as the Electoral College.

Regardless, I simply do not understand why people call any election a "popularity contest" with a negative connotation as if the election shouldn't be based on popularity but rather some mystical objective metric.

tl;dr: You're too stupid/retarded/uneducated to be posting in this thread. But hey, if it makes you feel any better, you'll fit right in with the rest of the electorate when you reach voting age.