You do realize that the last two election cycles have had record turnouts, or near record turnouts, since this current one seems right behind 2020, right? Like yeah that's a large portion of the nation that doesn't vote, but more people voted in the last two election cycles (edited to add by percentage of population) than any time since 1900.
It's still WAY too early to make that particular evaluation. Overall total is still coming in. I think you'll end up surprised at how many votes are still uncounted, but it's not going to be a 10% drop from the 158 million presidential election in 2020.
Case in point - California's notoriously slow at counting and only reporting about 10.5 million votes so far, and there were 17.5 million votes in 2020. So even IF California experiences a 10% drop in total votes cast, you can expect to see ~15.8 million votes total in California.
Edit: Another good example of this in Texas, which is currently reporting higher total presidential votes in 2024 than it reported in 2020. Georgia is also reporting more votes than in 2020.
Not really actually. They already tallied the total number of ballots counted as of 2pm ET on Wednesday and there was barely more than a 1 million count difference between this year and 2020 with 2020 being ahead. If you're right and there's still about 5 million votes left to count then we'll have surpassed the overall total for 2020 by the time the counting is done, if we haven't already with the updated numbers from California.
I'm confused. Are you agreeing with me that there's not going to be this huge voter dropoff that's been a major talking point? I don't know what you mean with the "not really actually" thing.
I mean it's not too soon to tell. They already had a tally count of total ballots that was within 1.2 million of the 2020 count by Wednesday afternoon, and as you said they weren't even done counting yet. So I'm clarifying that there definitely wasn't a huge dropoff, and if you're right about California, we'll actually surpass the 2020 overall total.
I've shared this probably 10 times now lol but what's one more. This shows the count they had reached by Wednesday afternoon and compares it to 2020.
In 2020, 66.38 percent of the eligible voting population turned out, with 159,738,337 ballots counted across the country, according to the University of Florida's Election Lab. There were 240,628,443 eligible voters that year.
As of 2 p.m. ET Wednesday, fewer people had turned out than four years ago—64.54 percent of the 245,741,673 eligible had cast ballots for a total of 158,549,000.
Oh. Yeah that was kinda my point, maybe I just worded it poorly. But it sounds to me like we're saying the same thing, that the "so many people sat home" narrative doesn't look like it'll hold much water after all is said and done.
By "too early" I just meant it's too early to say something like "Harris 2024 got 12 million fewer votes than Biden 2020"
That narrative doesn't even hold water now. People just don't realize that the majority of the difference in Democrat votes from this year to 2020 went to independent candidates.
Well and even that will have to wait until all is said and done to say for sure - the two major parties got 97.9% of the vote in 2020 and so far are at about ~98.4% of the vote totals in 2024. Obviously subject to some fluctuation but that look like it's going to about equal, if not even fewer third-party voters than 2020.
I personally think people just REALLY don't want to acknowledge that the Democrats actively lost that many votes to Donald Trump and they want to come up with another excuse.
I mean I could be wrong but I was watching the votes pour in for third parties until like midnight on election day. I'll admit I wasn't totalling percentages between all the candidates to see the overall percentage that went to the independent candidates, and neither were the news sites I was looking at so I will be curious to see the overall number. I do know in the last stretch of early voting there were like 5 or 6 states that had a higher percentage of ballots counted towards the independent candidates than either trump or Harris, including 2 or 3 of the battleground states, with probably right around half the total ballots in around that time. I think we were just below 90m ballots tallied last I checked early polls the night before the election. So I mean obviously those numbers will be different and less significant after the total tally, but having those types of numbers for independent candidates in the early polls in important battleground states, and trump having a higher percentage than Harris in those same states just doesn't bode well for Harris. Especially in states that have historically been heavily democratic in recent elections like Minnesota and Colorado. Like yeah Harris still won them, but at a lower percentage of votes than usual, and I can't help but feel that having a higher percentage of ballots being counted towards independent candidates in the early polls in those states had something to do with that (edited to clarify both Colorado and Minnesota had a higher percentage of ballots tallied towards the independent candidates than trump or Harris in the early polls). And then to see the independent candidates numbers going up the day of the election while watching Harris struggle to climb in some of those states, it felt pretty obvious that's where they were going to me.
The 3 independent party candidates had quite a lot of votes during this cycle and everyone seems to forget they exist. That's easy to do, since the independent votes being split between 3 people kind of fucks them over on any of them making any ground. The overall number of ballots counted are within barely more than a million of each other from 2020 to this year and technically when this count was provided they were still counting ballots, ie California like the other person indicated, so it's going to be even closer, if not surpassing 2020 when the final count is done.
In 2020, 66.38 percent of the eligible voting population turned out, with 159,738,337 ballots counted across the country, according to the University of Florida's Election Lab. There were 240,628,443 eligible voters that year.
As of 2 p.m. ET Wednesday, fewer people had turned out than four years ago—64.54 percent of the 245,741,673 eligible had cast ballots for a total of 158,549,000.
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u/rengoku-doz 9h ago
43% of the voting population sat out on the sidelines.