Summary
The 2024 presidential election saw record-high turnout nearing 2020 levels, with over 152 million ballots cast.
Donald Trump won both the Electoral College and the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes, defying conventional wisdom that high turnout benefits Democrats.
Key swing states like Georgia, Michigan, and Pennsylvania had increased turnout, with Trump outperforming Kamala Harris in battlegrounds despite her strong voter mobilization.
The GOP’s focus on early and mail voting, as well as targeting infrequent voters, proved effective, signaling a shift in Republican turnout strategies in the Trump era.
The 2024 presidential election saw record-high turnout
nearing 2020 levels
Is it just me or do these two statements directly contradict each other?
You’re right. This reeks of choosing your narrative before looking at the data to me.
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Fair point, that is logical.
Trump basically got the same number of votes as 2020. Someone else didn’t show up.
No he didn’t. At last count, he’s sitting at 77.4 million votes, which is a little more than 3 million more votes than he got in 2020 (74.2).
Compared to the nearly 11m dems who stayed home this election, it’s not that much.
Where did you get that 11 million number? Vote totals so far are a little more than 5 million short of 2020. Everyone keeps talking about 11 million, 15 million, 20 million people who stayed home and I think it’s frankly a way to cope with the hard and gross truth that the country shifted right. Some people stayed home this year, but from all the sources I can see, it’s nowhere near 11 million, and the fascist candidate increasing his vote totals every year is very alarming. I get people who don’t want to face that. It’s scary as hell, especially if you’re in an out group. In my traditionally deeply blue state, the split gap between Harris and The Fanta Menace was like 55/45. That’s WAY too close for comfort and while people staying home is a problem, it’s not the main problem this time around.
That’s possible and what a lot of people are saying.
It’s also possible people who voted for Biden voted for Trump instead.
“Big voter turnout” to me would still be wrong.
155+ million voters in 2020Population increases by roughly 6 million
Less than 150 million voters in 2024.
If we consider decreasing voter turnout high turnout, sure, it was high. That said, yes some voters likely swayed, but I’d like 80-90% voter turnout to be considered high, but we never get that.
Lot of accurate criticisms in this thread, but something we should also keep in mind, progressives are OK with that. If voters vote and it doesn’t go our way, we don’t look for ways to restrict voting or prevent voters from participating in the process. We don’t call in bomb threats or create arbitrary obstacles to voting. We celebrate high voter turnout, even when we lose. Democracy is bigger than one election.
Too bad this might be the last one
That’s how we felt before 2020 anyway. People actively voting for a party trying to destroy democracy changes the calculus a bit and we can no longer ignore the long-term ramifications of placing these kinds of people in power
Big? Trump got elected with only 20% of USians voting for him.
Anything less than 90% turnout would already start being dangerous for democracy.
Voting is not a right, it’s a duty.Our population increases every year. I hate when people compare numbers instead of percentages (of eligible voters).
Did you ever stop and compare how many votes Biden got to Reagan? So much for Reagan having the biggest landslide! /s
They never talk about percentages of eligible voters because it would be obvious that nobody wants any of these creeps and this “democracy” is a total sham.
Seriously I’ve tried to google this information historically. It’s not easy. I saw a zine about this a few years ago but I can never find it.
Do we have any stats showing what percentage of eligible voters turned out this year? If the US population keeps increasing, we’d expect “record turnout” every election.
According to Wikipedia, about 155.5 million people voted in 2020 and so far, there are about 150.2 votes counted this time (98% of votes counted). They say that in 2020 we had a 66.6% turnout, but until all the votes are counted, we don’t have a turnout number yet. That said, it seems on track to be a little lower than 2020, although not by a huge margin.
6 million less people voted so far than 2020, which is enough to make up the popular vote difference. I think this article’s conclusion is both* dismissive of population growth and also too generous in assuming those missing votes would have been split the same as those who did show up.
