Tag: Democratic Party Dropouts

For some time now, we have been about a 50-50 nation, with relatively small movements among voters determining the outcome of presidential elections. (Determining the outcome, that is, in light of the vagaries of the Electoral College system.)

In 2016, when 62,985,106 voters cast their votes for Trump, he only earned 45.9% of those who voted, and decisively lost the popular vote to Clinton, though he got more votes in the Electoral College. 

Between 2016 and 2024, Trump’s raw vote total increased by a whopping 13 million votes. But due to higher overall voter turnout in 2024, the percentage of voters opting for the Orange Godking increased by only about 4 percentage points. (Of course, the percentage increase is even lower than that if you look, not to actual voters, but to all registered voters, or all eligible voters.)

Four years ago, in 2020, despite the country’s horrible experience with Covid, Trump’s raw popular vote increased from about 63 million in 2016 to about 74.2 million in 2020. But voter turnout had increased, Trump’s percentage only rose from 45.9% to 46.9%, and Biden easily trumped Trump with 81,282,916 popular votes, or 51.3% of those who voted, and an Electoral College victory of 306 to 232.

This year, Democratic voters declined from 81,282,916 to 74,406,331. That’s a difference of 8,876,585. Some of these folks switched back to Trump—he got around 2.7 million more votes in 2024 than in 2020. Some probably decided to vote for a third party candidate. And a whole bunch of them just stayed home. 

For the sake of the discussion, let’s do this mental exercise and this back-of-the-envelope calculation. Let’s assume that all of Trump’s extra 2024 voters were people who had voted for Biden in 2020, but decided to switch sides in 2024. Let’s deduct these 2.7 assumed side-switchers from the missing 2024 Democratic voters. And let’s assume, for the sake of the discussion, that the rest of the missing Democratic voters were people who decided to sit out the 2024 election. That’s about 6.2 million voters.

If all those Democratic couch sitters had showed up for Harris, then she would have won the election handily—even taking into account all the people who switched from Biden back to Trump.