Last week’s presidential election has produced a question: How is it that Vice President Kamala Harris got almost 10 million fewer votes than President Joe Biden did in 2020?
The final count is not in. But as of Monday, President-elect Donald Trump had nearly 75 million votes, while Harris had 71.3 million, according to the usElectionAtlas.org website.
Trump is running ahead of his 2020 total, when he had 74.2 million. That year, Biden got 81.2 million votes, which remains the record for any president.
More than a few Trump supporters, comparing the 2024 and 2020 results, will point to Harris’ shortfall this year as — aha! — evidence that the 2020 race was rigged.
Recall that Trump filed at least 60 court challenges to various results, and not a single one of them, not even those heard by federal judges that Trump himself nominated to the bench, survived. Even the U.S. Supreme Court, with three Trump-appointed justices, turned him away.
That means if Democrats did cheat to win in 2020, they were so slick that Republicans couldn’t find the evidence. Raise your hand if you think either political party has the talent to get away with such a heist.
And it further means that if Democrats did that four years ago, they probably had the capability to do it again this year. How did that turn out?
For anyone willing to dig into the numbers, there are answers to why Harris got noticeably fewer votes than Biden did.
The main reason is that she got less support in many of the states that she won. Again, the 2024 count is not complete, but here are some examples:
• California: Biden got 11.1 million votes in 2020, while Harris got 7.2 million this year, a deficit of 3.9 million.
• New York: Biden 5.2 million in 2020, Harris 4.3 million, down 900,000.
• Illinois: Biden 3.4 million, Harris 2.9 million, down 500,000.
• New Jersey: Biden 2.6 million, Harris 1.9 million, down 700,000.
• Virginia: Biden 2.4 million, Harris 2.0 million, down 400,000.
In those five states alone, all of which Harris won, she got 6.4 million fewer votes that Biden did in 2020. If there was indeed a conspiracy four years ago, why would Democrats focus it on the states they were already sure to win?
There are several more Harris states where she had six-figure deficits to Biden. Massachusetts, Maryland, Washington, Colorado and Oregon delivered between them about 1 million fewer votes for the Democratic ticket this year. That’s a 7 million-plus deficit in just 10 Democratic states, which makes it much easier to envision another 3 million people in the rest of the country who switched to Trump this year or just didn’t vote.
In fact, the number of votes cast this year for Trump, Harris and all other candidates is running about 9.6 million below the 2020 total — 158.6 million four years ago compared to 149 million this time. The lower turnout is the true mystery of the 2024 election.
In 2020, an unpopular president weighed down by the covid-19 pandemic was running against someone who promised change. In 2024, an unpopular vice president weighed down by a battle against inflation and a leaky Mexican border was running against someone who promised to fix it.
The two storylines don’t seem that much different, but it’s clear that a few million voters weren’t as interested this year. There was an enthusiasm deficit among Democrats. That’s not as attention-getting as a conspiracy theory, but it’s what the numbers say.
— Jack Ryan, McComb Enterprise-Journal
