Shortly after the 2024 presidential election was called for Donald Trump, posts began circulating on social media wondering how Vice President Kamala Harris could have lost when there had been a record turnout. What happened to the other tens of million votes that had gone to President Joe Biden in 2020 when he faced Trump? Had someone tampered with millions of ballots? For example:
As Ewan Palmer of Newsweek notes, so far Harris has won around 68 million votes, with ballots still being counted in some states. Biden got 81.2 million in 2020. And Trump, it should be noted, has approximately 72.6 million votes, which is about 2 million shy of the 74.2 he received against Biden.
The “record-breaking turnout” in the 2024 election isn’t accurate. Biden-Trump saw 158 million ballots cast. The total for this year’s election will fall below that number.
“With Trump looking set to receive a similar number of votes between the 2024 and 2020 elections, political commentators and experts are wondering why voters who previously backed Democrats rejected Harris this time around. Others have suggested that many people who supported Biden in 2020 later became disillusioned over the country’s high levels of inflation and the cost of living crisis and took their frustrations out on Harris.”
Simply put, it seems that millions of Democrats declined to vote this year. Some may have cast a ballot for Trump or third-party candidates such as Green Party candidate Jill Stein or Chase Oliver of the Libertarian Party. Others could have simply refused to vote for either Harris or Trump by leaving the presidential race box on their ballot empty.
For years, Democrats have prided themselves on having a better get-out-the-vote operation than the GOP. While that’s technically true, there’s no way to predict how a person will vote once they fill out their ballot.
