The 2024 Presidential Race – Part I: The Numbers

Any attempt to explain the “why” of the 2024 election results must start with the “what” of the election results. Here are the numbers: 154,818,100 people voted for president. Of these, (slightly) less than a majority, 49.9%, voted for Trump, 48.4% voted for Harris, a margin of 1.5% and a popular vote difference of 2,285,467 votes. (The other 0.7% voted for third parties.) This was the closest winning margin since 1968, when Richard Nixon defeated Hubert Humphrey by .7%.

(In 2016, Trump lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by 2.1%, but won the Electoral College, so it’s hard to measure the “winning” margin in that race – minus 2.1%? Similarly, in 2000 George W. Bush won the Electoral College vote, but lost the popular vote to Al Gore by .5%.) (Trivia note for data junkies: Gore lost Florida by 537 votes; he won the national popular vote by 537 thousand.)

If just .8% of 2024 voters (1,143,000) had voted for Harris instead of Trump, Harris would have won the popular vote

What about the Electoral College vote? In the three “Blue Wall” states – Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania – Trump won by a total of 231,489 votes. If as few as 116,000 voters in those states, about .7%, had voted for Harris instead of Trump, she would have won those states and the presidency.

(As for the other battleground states, Georgia was not far behind, with a margin of 2.2%. The margins in North Carolina, Nevada and Arizona were not very close, at 3.2%, 3.9% and 5.5%, respectively.)

Much has been made of the fact that the 2024 results in the vast majority of counties were a rightward shift from the 2020 results. Of course, they were. This is neither remarkable nor uncommon. When the national political mood shifts in one direction, the county results will shift in the same direction. Actually, it’s the reverse, since the national popular vote is nothing more than the sum of local votes.

Joe Biden won the popular vote in 2020 over Trump by 4.5%. Trump won the popular vote over Harris by 1.5%. That’s a significant net shift of 6%.

While the states vary greatly in their basic partisan leanings, they respond very similarly to national political currents. As an example, inflation affects voters in California and Texas; it affects whites, blacks and Latinos. It was a major concern for voters everywhere; they held Democrats more responsible for it and voted accordingly. Independents moved toward the GOP, and some soft Democrats voted for Trump. The pattern may also have occurred because of immigration, general dissatisfaction with the Biden presidency, etc.

The same pattern has occurred in most past elections. George W. Bush won the 2004 election by 2.4% over John Kerry. Four years later, Barack Obama defeated John McCain by 7.2%, a 9.6% shift. Not surprisingly, Obama improved on Kerry’s performance in the vast majority of counties, both red and blue.

In 2012, Obama bested George Romney by 3.9%, a much smaller margin than he achieved he in 2008, so it is no surprise that a majority of counties moved rightward compared to 2008.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by 2.1%, just a little more than half of Obama’s 2012 result, so there was a further swing in the Republicans’ direction.

There was a somewhat modest popular vote shift from Clinton to Biden and, accordingly, a modest shift of counties to Biden.

Trump and a few of his supporters uttered the “landslide” word, but that didn’t last long. Not only Trump supporters, but also some reasonably neutral voices in the media, talked of Trump’s “mandate.” It is a stretch to find much of a mandate in winning less than a majority of the votes cast.

It has been common to hear not only Trump supporters and some in the media, but also some Democrats say such things as “the country has chosen this course,” “the people have spoken,” “Americans said they want…” None of these things are really true.

Almost 155 million Americans voted for president on November 5th. Although there is not a precise count of “voting-eligible” people (18 or older and citizens) in the U.S., a reasonable estimate is 245 million. The total 2024 presidential vote of 150 million would be 63% of that, and 50% of that would be 31.5%. What can be said is that 31.5% of people eligible to vote cast a vote for Trump. To be fair to Trump, given the relatively low historic turnout rate of eligible people, it is not clear that any presidential candidate has ever received votes from a majority of the voting-eligible population, certainly none since the 19th century.

With just tiny shifts in the vote, the narrative of the 2024 election might have gone something like this:

“In an election which was historic in both its outcome and its closeness, Vice President Kamala Harris became the first woman, and only the second person of color, to be elected President of the United States. She had to overcome some stiff headwinds – being part of the deeply unpopular Biden administration, stubborn inflation, an immigration crisis and a world-wide anti-incumbent wave that has roiled major democracies around the world. And she had to do this in a campaign that lasted only 107 days. She won a tiny plurality of the popular vote nationality, and narrow margins in the “Blue Wall” states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania delivered an Electoral College victory.”

Instead, there has been a wave of theories about why Harris and the Democrats were “clobbered,” “dealt a knockout blow,” “swamped,” etc., etc. An examination of these narratives will be explored in a subsequent post.

-Tom Wieder