Last week I noticed that Harris received substantially fewer votes than Biden did in 2020 (more on that below), and that piqued my interest. With around 98% reporting in, here are some more numbers and what I think they say, without much weighing-in on the merit of either candidate.
- Voter turnout is usually around 60%, ranging from 55-65% since 1992. *TBD this year though.- Trump got 50.4% of the vote, about 900k more votes than he received in 2020.
- Harris got 48% of the vote, about 9M fewer votes than Biden got in 2020.
- There are 12.5M more voting age people in 2024 than in 2020.
- Higher turnout in 2020 (65%) - in a pandemic, voting was easy, we were engaged politically cause we had a lot of time to argue about politics.
- 12.5M people at 60% turnout = 7.5M more voter age people probably/actually voting.
- 48% of 7.5M = 3.6M potential more Democrat votes than 2020
- 50.4% of 7.5M = 3.78M potential more Republican votes than 2020
- In WI, Tammy Baldwin got 1.672M votes (and beat a straight white male); Harris got 1.667M.
Trump's +900k vote count is important because if your voting base is not growing with the population, you have a problem. Obviously Democrats have a huge problem too - my guess is voters that typically vote Democrat, but skew more undecided, were alienated en masse by the hubris with which Biden dropping out was handled by DNC overlords. I think that was enough of a push for a lot of unenthusiastic voters to defiantly and triumphantly say that voting for the lesser of two evils is beneath them. We've been voting for the lesser of two evils for my entire voting life.
My take is that if the Democrat candidate had been stronger and had a traditional campaign, or been in the right place at the right time (like Biden in 2020), he or she would have had a good turnout and crushed Trump again. Harris was in a bit of a pickle as the incumbent VP for an outgoing single-term President that had a less than stellar term. Seems to be a party problem rather than a candidate problem as I don't think Harris is any worse than any candidate in my 24 year old voting life.
I could be wrong and what I see as a refreshing streak of dissent could just be pessimism and apathy, which is still maybe a step closer to unity, right?
