As final votes are tallied around the country, particularly in Democratic-heavy California, the Democrats’ disappointing performance in the presidential race–and the overestimation of Democratic voter enthusiasm–comes clear in one startling statistic: Somewhere between seven and ten million people who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 did not show up for Democrats in the 2024 election.
About 156 million Americans cast votes in the election. Trump’s vote total is likely to finish up in the range of 79 million votes, around a nine percent increase from what he received in 2020. Harris’s total, however, will likely fall in the 71- to 73 million range, lower than the 81 million people who voted for Biden in 2020.
There’s a lot of data in the exit polling, but one item stands out: 52% of white women voted for Donald Trump. In an election where women’s bodily autonomy was on the ballot in a number of states, those female voters chose to split the ticket, voting to preserve their rights to abortion, but voting for the ticket that did the most to remove those rights.