Eight million missing Democratic voters

One of the annoying features of American elections is that the West Coast takes forever to count their votes, because the three coastal states all now use mail-in voting AND count votes that are postmarked by Election Day, not merely received. Also California is much slower than Washington and Oregon for reasons I don’t understand (fully 40% of the California vote is yet to be counted).

Anyway between one thing and another there are about nine million votes still to be counted, which means that roughly 151 million people will have ended up voting for president. If you’re wondering how this compares to 2020, i.e., the last time the American people were asked to save the country from the horror of another Trump presidency, the answer is “really badly,” especially given that the 2024 election followed Trump’s attempt to overthrow the government after the 2020 election, and featured a campaign in which he promised to imprison his political enemies, set up concentration camps for 20 million residents, etc.

Just under 159 million people voted for president in 2020. Meanwhile, about four million more people were eligible to vote this year than four years ago. The breakdown for that is that 16 million fourteen to seventeen year olds in 2020 are now eligible, while roughly 12 million eligible voters from 2020 died between the two elections. If you hold the percentage of eligible voters who actually voted constant between 2020 and 2024, you would have expected about 2.7 million more votes this year, i.e., about 161.5 million. Instead we’re going to end up with just about ten million fewer votes than that. The overwhelming majority of that figure will consist of votes that the Democratic presidential candidate got in 2020 and didn’t get in 2024: Harris is going to end up with about eight million fewer votes than Biden got.

Now of course it’s hard to compare voter turnout in 2020 and 2024 directly because of the pandemic. But if anything, the absence of a deadly nationwide pandemic in 2024 should, one would think, have increased voter participation in 2024, everything else being equal. Practically all the measures that were put into place to make voting easier in 2020 in various states because of the pandemic have been retained: Voting almost everywhere is much easier now than it was prior to 2020, with all but three states — Alabama, Mississippi, and New Hampshire — providing various sorts of no-excuse necessary absentee and early voting options. And you could vote this year without worrying (much) about getting a potentially life-threatening virus, if you don’t count fascism.

But turnout was way down. Or more precisely it was way down among Democrats, as Trump is going to end up with perhaps 1.5 million more votes than he got in 2020.

This, to me, is the most astounding fact about the 2024 election. Basically the same people who voted for Trump in 2020 voted for him again in 2024, with a bit of marginal growth in a few demographics (Latino and Black men, and young men in general). But about eight million Democrats just didn’t show up, which as somebody or the other has noted is about 90% of life, and 100% of elections.

Commenter DTGstl314 notes in a thread below something that seems relevant:

Purely anecdotal, but one thing I noticed today in my interactions with the normies who don’t typically spend much time thinking about politics in their day-to-day lives is that very few people who aren’t tuned in 24-7 to this stuff seemed particularly fazed by the outcome. And I’m including people who voted for Harris. I have a few coworkers who aren’t especially politically engaged but did vote for Harris express disappointment over the outcome, but they don’t really seem filled with terror over what’s to come. They know Trump’s an idiot who says and does all kinds of idiotic shit, but they don’t see him as a threat to American democracy itself. They view him about the same way they viewed Dubya 20 years ago. Shitty president, but he won’t be president forever, and we’ll survive. I don’t know how this is for the population as a whole, but I don’t think most people are as upset about this as we are, because most people don’t spend even one second of their days thinking about the policy goals of Project 2025, and most people don’t know who the fuck Stephen Miller is.

This is essentially the Ariana Grande theory of politics in action, and it’s both the good news and the bad news I suppose.