In the weeds ... Trump's popular vote proportion keeps on falling

by rmartin1241

Community

(This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Wednesday, Dec. 04, 2024 Wednesday, Dec. 04, 2024 at 8:05:43am PST

The total popular vote count has not yet been certified, but since Duarte just conceded to Gray in California H.R. District 13, I figured we are close enough to the endpoint to discuss statistics that are unfavorable to Donald Trump.

The screenshot above is from an Excel file I created to summarize the popular vote as the final votes were counted. It shows a trend.

On November 21, according to USA Today Donald Trump legitimately had 49.9% of the popular vote (when rounded to 3 significant digits).
On November 25, Trump’s fraction of the popular vote had fallen to 49.8%, but Reuters still kept his percentage on the graphic as 49.9%.
On December 4 (today), I got two different counts:
- US Election Atlas (Trump with 49.8%)
- CBS (a more recent count — Trump 49.7%)
- The CBS graphic is wrong — Trump’s percentage remains at 49.9%, but Election Atlas got it right.
During this time, Harris’s popular vote share rose from 48.22% to 48.25% a smaller rise than Trump’s fall.
That’s because the total 3rd-party vote proportion went up from 1.92% to 2.02%.
Finally, the vote difference between Trump and Harris fell over this same time window from 2.535 million to 2.295 million. That’s 240,000 more votes going to Harris than Trump during this window.

Hey CBS, Reuters, USA Today — please change the popular vote percentages on your election page!

Hey US Election Atlas — Thank you for reporting the news with accuracy and precision!