Retraction: Looks like the numbers described below were caused by the fact that we were comparing partly counted votes in 2024 to fully counted votes in 2020. Here’s a chart I made comparing both years for those states on the East, which are 99% counted at the time I did this. The result was that only Maryland had a higher Trump vote count in 2020. I suppose I could just delete this, but I believe in owning my mistakes.
Original Post:
There are a lot of people who are trying to read this as a mandate for Trump. But the number of people who voted for him actually went down, which shows it was NOT a mandate. Trump got over 2 million fewer votes overall than in 2020. It's just that Harris got more than 13 million fewer than Biden in 2020.
The fact that the electorate is smaller this time is remarkable. almost every year, the overall electorate goes up, simply because the population has gone up. That’s why the loser in every presidential election usually gets more votes than the winner in the previous election.
From Philosopher David Rosenthal:
How could Trump make such gains over 2020??!! What are people thinking??!!
Reporters keeps referring to percentages, not actual vote counts. And MANY FEWER PEOPLE voted for Trump than in 2020! Trump RARELY MADE GAINS over 2020; he mainly suffered losses!
Trump got over 2 million fewer votes overall than in 2020. It's just that Harris got more than 13 million fewer than Biden in 2020.
Reporters are saying Trump made gains across the country--and that there was even a red shift in my home state of NYS. With very few exceptions--e.g., Florida--that simply is not so. For the most part, and in total, Trump suffered losses, but Harris did significantly more poorly.
For NYS, Trump got 44.2% in 2024, and only 37.74% in 2020. But that was despite his getting 3,251,997 votes this time, as against 3,434,451 in 2020--over 200,000 fewer. It's because Harris's 4,336,052 in NYS is nearly 1 million fewer than Biden's 5,244,886 in 2020. (In Florida Trump did gain 4.3 million; but Harris was also 6.3 fewer than Biden 2020, and Stein got only 43,020 .)
Casting the election as a horserace encourages mentioning only percentages, and not actual vote counts. But that does significantly distort the picture of what happened.
The total vote for either Trump or Harris was 14-15 million fewer than the roughly 153.5 million that voted for either Biden or Trump in 2020. That's not Jill Stein; that's people staying home--a significant decrease in Trump's number of votes--but a much sharper decrease for Harris over Biden 2020.
Why did Harris do so poorly? The decrease for Trump suggests that racism and sexist may not have been major factors. How much was Biden's being unpopular? How much was the way Harris was chosen--late and without a primary? How much was her seeming to showcase reproductive rights more than anything else, whereas people are now taking it to be an issue for state ballot initiatives? Those are important questions.
I do not in any way mean to suggest that Trump's win is not catastrophically bad. It definitely is.
But the explanation involves a very dramatic falloff of votes for the Democratic candidate--despite a significant but significantly smaller falloff for Trump.
