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Turnout for the presidential election is not yet final, but it’s clear that fewer people voted in 2024 compared with 2020.
Comparing the two elections, Donald Trump added about 2.8 million votes to his total in his 2024 victory. Vice President Kamala Harris, on the other hand, underperformed by about 6.8 million votes compared with Joe Biden in 2020, according to CNN election results as of November 25.
Here are seven charts and maps that explain how the US popular vote, turnout in individual states and ultimately turnout in the seven key battleground states – where electoral votes were up for grabs – tell the story of Harris’ loss.
This year will end up being one of just two elections in the 21st century in which the Republican presidential candidate got more votes than the Democratic candidate. It is also one of only two times in the 21st century that the number of votes cast dropped compared with the previous presidential election. The other came in 2012, when about 2.2 million fewer votes were cast than in 2008.
Another way to look at Trump’s narrow edge in the popular vote is that he got the vote of about a third of the citizen voting-age population. A slightly smaller portion backed Harris. Another third did not vote at all.
While Democrats’ portion of the vote has been up and down in recent elections, Trump has won more votes in each of the elections in which he was a candidate. Viewed in raw numbers, he got about 63 million votes in 2016, 74 million in 2020 and nearly 77 million in 2024.
The difference for Democrats was that turnout surged in 2020, the pandemic election.
Harris got fewer votes than Biden in 45 of the 50 states and Washington, DC. While votes are still being added to the totals in some states, changes at this point would be marginal.
Most of Harris’ drop-off came in populous states like California, New York and Florida, where a dip in support for Harris did not affect the Electoral College vote tally. Trump boosted his overall count in those population centers as well, padding his count by hundreds of thousands of votes in Texas, Florida and New York and to a lesser extent in traditional Democratic strongholds like New Jersey and Massachusetts.
Zooming in on the hotly contested battleground states where the election was much closer, Harris and Trump both gained votes compared with 2020 in Wisconsin, Georgia, North Carolina and Nevada. The population has also grown in all of those states in the past four years.
Arizona’s population has also grown, though the total number of votes cast in the state held about even. Harris got fewer votes there compared with Biden in 2020, and Trump carried it with his largest margin of victory across the seven battlegrounds.
Pennsylvania and Michigan are battleground states where the population has not grown in the past four years and where Harris got fewer votes in 2024 than Biden got in 2020.
Democrats lamenting the results have pointed out that the election was decided by about 230,000 votes in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, battleground states won narrowly by Trump. But Harris lost votes compared with Biden across the country.
Harris’ losses compared with Biden were biggest in Southern California, southern Florida and in the Northeast. The few places where Harris got more votes than Biden were largely concentrated in those seven battleground states, in particular Georgia and North Carolina, but it wasn’t enough to overcome Trump’s gains. The only state where Harris gained votes on Biden’s 2020 performance, that was not also a battleground state, was Utah.
Trump made gains across the seven battleground states in particular, but they weren’t limited to places with higher turnout. Trump also saw increases in support in a range of counties where fewer votes were cast overall.
In Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, even in many counties where more people voted in 2024, Harris got fewer votes than Biden in 2020, although there were pockets in the swing states where Harris got more votes than Biden.
Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that in the states where the campaign was the most hotly contested, more people voted in 2024, whereas in states where one side or the other seemed more likely to win, turnout generally dropped.
