Democrats have long banked on the idea that the more people who vote, the better their chances of winning are. But in 2024, that just wasn’t true.
While nationwide turnout this year is projected to be down very slightly from 2020, the swing states tell a different story. Across six of the seven states that decided the election—Michigan, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, and Wisconsin—more voters cast a ballot in the 2024 presidential election than in 2016 or 2020, according to a Daily Kos analysis of Associated Press vote totals as of Monday at 3:30 PM ET.
The only swing state with lower turnout was Arizona—but there’s a big caveat here. Only 92% of the state’s estimated vote has been reported. And if you add another 8% to its current vote total, it shows a net increase from 2020 of about 20,000 votes. In other words, after everything is tallied, Arizona’s raw vote total this year will likely be on par with 2020’s, if not a little higher.
As it stands, on net, over 367,000 more people voted in the seven battleground states this year than in 2020. And compared with 2016? It’s not even close. In those seven states, a combined 4.9 million more people voted this year than in 2016.
This year, the “Blue Wall” states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin saw an average increase of about 71,000 votes from 2020. Of those three, Pennsylvania saw the smallest increase, at just over 5,200 votes. However, about 122,000 votes still need to be counted in the Keystone State. Adding that to the state’s vote total would push the three-state average up to about 112,000 more votes this year.
Joe Biden flipped Georgia in 2020, winning the state by nearly 12,000 votes. And this year, the state saw a spike of voter turnout, with 244,000 more voters casting a ballot than in 2020 … and with Donald Trump winning the state by just under 117,000 votes.
In fact, Democratic nominee Kamala Harris received more votes than Biden in three swing states: Georgia, North Carolina, and Wisconsin. And The Washington Post reports that Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin also smashed turnout records this year. And Harris lost all of them.
The truth is, even if each party turned out 100% of its registered voters, swing-state elections would still be determined by independents. In none of the battlegrounds that publicly report voters’ partisan affiliations do Democrats make up more than 45% of the electorate, according to a March analysis by Ballotpedia.
So why did Harris lose when more swing-state voters turned out? Well, we don’t know yet.
There are signals that Harris’ message didn’t land with working-class voters and that voters at large blamed Harris—because of her role in Biden's administration—for the inflation that caused them serious economic stress. (And that’s true even if America weathered inflation far better than other high-income countries.)
There were also strong, global anti-incumbent headwinds leading into this election. The Financial Times recently reported that incumbent parties, no matter their political beliefs, were getting slammed by voters. The Times pegged inflation and increased immigration as likely the two main reasons behind this anti-incumbent wave.
So it’s very possible that no Democrat could’ve beaten Trump this year.
But beyond that, we don’t have reliable enough data to figure out exactly what happened—or what needs to happen going forward. That’s largely because we don’t have solid demographic data to work with. That data should come in six or seven months, when the Pew Research Center and Catalist each release their validated-voter reports, which are far more reliable than exit polls.
For example, CNN’s exit polls in 2016 said Trump won white women by 9 percentage points, but Pew’s analysis later found he won them by just 2 points. And that flawed exit-poll data led to a glut of written-too-soon articles.
For now, though, it seems you can cross “low turnout” off the reasons why we’re being dragged into a second Trump administration.
Campaign Action
