Poor voter turnout a worry for both Democrats and Republicans

Where did Joe Biden’s voters go? It turns out Trump didn’t improve his total vote count much from 2020 to 2024.

US President Joe Biden steps out of the booth after casting his early-voting ballot in New Castle, Delaware, on October 28, 2024. Picture: AFP

Last week, Donald Trump easily surpassed the most important number in American politics: 270. But 270 electoral votes isn’t the only sum that matters. Vote totals do, too, and both parties should be concerned about what their candidate got last week.

The Democrats’ problem is certainly bigger. In 2020, Joe Biden received 81.3 million votes. As of Wednesday, with about 2.2 million votes in California to count, Vice-President Kamala Harris had received 72.4 million nationwide.

What happened to the millions of Americans who voted for Biden but not Harris? Most didn’t go to Trump. His 2024 tally so far is 75.6 million, up from 74.2 million four years ago. Even if that difference entirely came from former Biden voters, that leaves 7.5 million unaccounted for. Only a small fraction could have gone to the Green Party. (It won just over 400,000 votes in 2020 and about 700,000 this time.) If even a third of these missing Democrats had turned out to vote and stayed loyal, Harris might now be planning her inaugural address.

Why didn’t they vote? Ignore crackpot theories that Democrats manufactured millions of fake ballots in 2020 and mysteriously neglected to do so this time. There are two good explanations. First, Biden’s performance in office turned off many Democratic voters. Second, Harris failed to re-­energise them in her abbreviated campaign of just over 100 days.

The Fox News/AP voter analysis – looking at polling conducted by the National Opinion Research Centre between October 28 and November 5 – supports this. The NORC surveyed more than 120,000 early and election day voters. Only 29 per cent said America was headed in the right direction. Just 42 per cent approved of Biden’s handling of the presidency, with a mere 17 per cent strongly approving. No party has ever kept the White House with numbers that bad.

The poll also revealed that Harris beat Trump on the questions of who has “the mental capability” and “moral character” to serve as president and tied with him on who respondents thought “looks out for people like you”. But she trailed him badly on the more important questions of who was a “strong leader”, who was “capable of handling a crisis” and who “has the right policy ideas.” Harris had some outstanding moments, especially in the debate. But she couldn’t shake the impression that she was, in the Trump campaign’s words, “weak, failed, dangerously liberal”.

Still, she mounted a massive ground game. Fox pollster and University of Texas at Austin political scientist Daron Shaw says the Fox News/AP analysis showed that Harris’s campaign contacted more voters than Trump’s did in battleground states. But a higher percentage of those the Trump campaign did reach turned out for him in the end than showed up for Harris after her team’s door knocks and calls. Trump also did better among voters whom neither campaign reached personally. Whatever these voters read, saw or heard about the Republican on their own moved them to support him. His superior social-media influencer efforts likely provided a great assist here.

Though they have no reason to be as despondent as Democrats, Republicans should still look carefully at last week’s results. There’s reason to worry that the GOP may be in a tight spot come 2026 or 2028 if it doesn’t examine what happened in this election.

Trump increased his vote total between 2020 and 2024 by only around 2 per cent. This was substantially smaller than his 2016 to 2020 bump up, when he netted an 18 per cent jump. It’s also far less than the increases the last two Republican presidents who won re-election enjoyed. Ronald Reagan got 24 per cent more votes in 1984 than in 1980, while George W. Bush received 23 per cent more votes in 2004 than he did in 2000.

Could Trump’s marginal improvement over 2020 mean the new Republican working-class coalition is topping out? If so, the GOP might be highly vulnerable in 2026 and 2028, especially if some of those nearly nine million missing Biden voters show up. Republicans would have to find a way to expand their coalition still further, drawing in college-educated and suburban voters, and hope Democrats don’t start winning back working-class voters.

The Republican Party is at its strongest point since 2004. But politics is unsettled. Just as voters turned on Democrats when they came to think Biden’s policies were extreme and out of touch, so too could they turn on Republicans if Trump strays from what voters consider his essential responsibilities – growing the economy and securing the border. Their message? Stick to the essentials and avoid distractions.

The Wall Street Journal

Karl Rove twice masterminded the election of George W. Bush.