By James K. Galbraith
AUSTIN: As of this writing, Donald Trump has received about 75.1 million votes in the US presidential election, and Kamala Harris about 71.8 million. Though the numbers will continue to rise as absentee and mail-in ballots are counted, Trump’s final tally will be only slightly higher than his 2020 total of 74.2 million votes. For Harris, though, we will see a disastrous decline from the 81.2 million votes that Joe Biden received, and this despite the fact that the voting-eligible population has increased by four million.
In other words, Trump gained almost no support in his four-year campaign for redemption. If all the voters were the same, one could even say that he merely got his 2020 supporters to vote for him again. In fact, about 13 million people (most of them eligible voters) have died, and about 17 million have become voter-eligible, implying that Trump replaced his losses about one-for-one, while a decline in turnout cost the Democrats nearly ten million votes.
These numbers cast grave doubt on explanations of the result that focus on economic conditions, and still more on the impact of advertising and get-out-the-vote campaigns. Advertising, rallies, and the “ground game” were heavily concentrated in the swing states, yet the results there mirrored those across the whole country – including in states such as Massachusetts and Texas, where the outcome was never in doubt. The biggest proportional shifts toward Trump were in New York, New Jersey, Florida, and California. So much for the billion dollars that the Democrats spent on campaigning. Four years ago, Biden did better from his basement.
The results also deflate analyses based on the “American voter.” Racism, sexism, and anger over the economy, migration, or reproductive rights (the Democratic “hope” issue this year) no doubt exist. But they do not appear to have affected the results any more (or less) than in past years. Those who went to the polls appear to have voted as they did last time. There are always a few “swing voters,” but there is a reason reporters seek them out in the way that anthropologists once sought out cannibals: they are rare.
The real story is that one side voted at peak strength, and the other did not.
There are no reliable data on the ideological motives of non-voters. But exit polls do indicate that the shift in the mix of voters was greater at lower income levels; the share of voters with annual incomes below $50,000 who voted for Biden was greater than for Harris. Among Hispanics, notably relatively low-income voters along the Texas border (in very small counties, to be sure), the shift toward Trump was dramatic.
After we have ruled out the implausible, at least three reasonable conjectures remain. The first concerns the conditions of voting. In 2020, owing to the pandemic, voting was more accessible than ever before. Millions cast their ballots through early voting, vote-by-mail, drive-through collection points, 24-hour voting, and other convenient methods, and turnout (as a proportion of the eligible electorate) was the highest it had been since 1900 – long before the civil-rights era, and two decades before the enfranchisement of women. In 2024, some – though not all – of these expedients no longer existed, after already declining in 2022. It is standard in America to use the structure of voting to help determine the outcome: long lines at the polls discourage turnout, especially among working people with limited time.
A second plausible explanation concerns voter registration. Students and low-income minority citizens move more frequently and usually must re-register every time their address changes. It is highly probable that this burden falls more heavily on Democrats.
The third hypothesis turns on the long-standing divisions within the Democratic Party, which is about 70-80% centrist and 20-30% “left,” but completely controlled by its centrist majority. This has been the case ever since George McGovern’s defeat in 1972, but the control now extends to the point of candidate selection for congressional seats and national-party funding for federal campaigns.
The Clintons and Obamas are currently the de facto heads of the centrist faction, and Biden and Harris were their appointees. Bernie Sanders carried the torch of the left in 2016 and 2020 but threw his support behind Biden in exchange for concessions on policy. In 2024, there was no Democratic left, because there was no real primary or contest of any kind, only a last-minute closed-door candidate replacement. Some of the left’s remnants – Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (denied access to the Democratic primary ballot) and Tulsi Gabbard – went over to Trump’s camp. The actual left in 2024 was a movement called “Palestine.” It had no home in either party.
The Democratic leadership engineered this situation and must therefore desire it. Win or lose, it remains in control of a vast shadow apparatus: consultants, pollsters, lobbyists, fundraisers, key positions on Capitol Hill. Any concessions to new forces within the party would undermine this control, whereas losses to Republicans do not. The Democratic leadership would far rather lose an election or two – or even become a permanent minority party – than open the party to people it cannot control.
The 2024 election was, therefore, a suicide. The Democratic leadership was, at best, indifferent to the erosion of voting access, negligent in retaining 2020’s new voters, and proactive in ensuring the abstention of what little remains of its “left” wing. It tried to cover this up, as usual, with celebrity endorsements and identity politics. As usual, it did not work. But the party’s mandarins and their apparatchiks will be around next time to try again.
James K. Galbraith, Chair in Government/Business Relations and Professor of Government at the University of Texas at Austin, is the co-author (with Jing Chen) of the forthcoming Entropy Economics: The Living Basis of Value and Production (University of Chicago Press, 2025).
Project Syndicate, 2024
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