Kamala Harris earned more votes than Obama or Clinton
And some other reassuring - and extremely urgent - math
We lost the presidential election because a beautiful, broad coalition of 71 million voters (and counting!) voted for Kamala Harris. That’s roughly 29% of the eligible population.
To put this number in context, Barack Obama won 69 million in 2012 (~29% of the adult population). Hillary Clinton won about 66 million in 2016 (~27ish% of the adult population).
Of course, Joe Biden set an extraordinary bar when he handily won 81 million votes in 2020 (~31% of the entire adult population and the largest number ever cast for a candidate). In that election, Trump won 74 million (30% of the adult population).
Trump won 75 million this year (and counting, around 30.7% of the eligible population). This year, only about 1.3 million votes were siphoned off by Jill Stein and Robert Kennedy, far less than 1% of eligible adults.
For anyone doing the math in their head, yes, that’s right. While around 147 million adults voted in this election - nearly 100 million eligible adults did not vote at all. So almost a third voted for Harris, almost a third voted for Trump, and well more than a third sat the election out.
Let this sink in - the headlines all say Trump won with 50.4% of the vote, which could lead one to believe that just over half of the adults in this country voted for him. Nope. And this is how it goes every single election. Even Joe Biden - who won the most votes ever in the history of the U.S. - only won only slightly more than a third of the vote.
I’m going to get to some very reassuring and highly actionable math in just a minute.
But first, why don’t eligible adults in the US vote?
It’s worth noting that between 2-4 million people can’t vote because of a felony conviction. Laws vary state by state on this issue, and often people returning from imprisonment for a felony don’t understand whether they can indeed vote and how to regain their right to vote. I spoke with someone in Florida in 2020 who told me he couldn’t vote for this reason, but when I looked up his registration status, it turns out he could. He was overjoyed. Generally, states are starting to shift toward restoration of voting rights, but this is a key local/state issue to expand voting rights in the US. Several swing states do not automatically restore voting rights after a term has been served, including Pennsylvania.
But still, 90 million eligible voters just didn’t vote in the 2024 election. There are a multitude of reasons for this, and this post from 538 is a wonderful explanation of many of the barriers to voting. I’ve heard - and helped with - so many of these firsthand from people who want to vote democrat and have to navigate ridiculous barriers to exercise their rights.
But I want to briefly mention one HUGE reason people don’t vote. Especially young people (yes, Trump made gains with young people, but they’re still trending toward democrats).
The numbers of registered voters in the US varies quite a bit election to election, and varies even more dramatically state to state. If you’re thinking about what to do in the next 2-4 years to win more handily in 2026 and 2028, getting young people registered and excited about democratic candidates well in advance of registration deadlines (especially in PA, Michigan, and Wisconsin) is probably one of the most effective things we can do. We can also advocate for automatic voter registration mechanisms (about half of states currently use them). This state-wise analysis of youth registration is especially interesting. Pennsylvania’s youth voter registration rates dropped quite a bit between 2020 and 2024.
But before we start thinking about that, some highly actionable (indeed, quite time sensitive) and reassuring math - via a metaphor.
Imagine cheering on your favorite baseball team for an incredibly close 9 innings of the final game of the world series. In fact, imagine that the bases are loaded - in the bottom of the ninth - and the pitcher on the mound starts to slump. He’s done a great service to the team, but he’s obviously done. There’s one out left to go. From the warm-up pen, a relief pitcher strides to the mound (in chuck taylors). She laughs. She’s got this. She pitches beautifully. Everyone is dazzled. But with two strikes and three balls, the batter at the plate hits a high pop up. It looks like it’s headed for foul territory, but instead it grazes the pole and bounces into the stands past first base. Fair ball. Home run. Your opponents do a victory lap.
You pack up - exhausted, demoralized - and head for the exit. Game over. Season over.
That’s how this week has felt. But that feeling - defeat - ignores some highly actionable math, because elections have 10th innings.
Every election, the final reason that eligible citizens don’t vote is because they made simple, fixable mistakes on their ballots. This is the only barrier to voting that can be fixed after the polls close, through “ballot curing” efforts. Some swing states allow ballot curing, and others don’t. But ballot curing can help reduce rejection rates (in 2020 - more than 1% of all votes had errors!) dramatically. When a race is really close, ballot curing can make up the difference. My baseball metaphor falls apart, of course, because baseball takes as long as it takes, whereas elections have deadlines. Ballot curing often means racing the clock to reach out to thousands of voters to alert them and help them fix their ballots before the state counts are certified.
As of today, really important races, including those that will determine control of the house of representatives, remain uncalled. Several of these races hang on miniscule margins.
Bob Casey is refusing to concede his PA senate seat, and PA voters have until Tuesday at 4pm to fix mistakes on their ballots. So jump in and volunteer to help. I spoke to several Pennsylvanians yesterday and they were grateful to hear that there was still time to cast their vote. Even more importantly, Californians have even more time to fix their ballots, and seven house races remain too close to call in CA. So jump in and call CA voters.
I think we lost this election for a number of reasons, but one meta reason seems to be that we get so caught up in the drama at the top of the ticket that we forget that elections are simply regularly timed opportunities to advance both power and an agenda via profoundly simple - and often extraordinarily close - margins. While we have four years to build the power to win back the executive branch, we have just a few days to close the margins on key house races - some of which will be decided by a few hundred or thousand votes.
If we can somehow pull out a win in the house, we can profoundly limit Trump and republican power during the next two years. So I’m astonished that anyone who cares about a progressive agenda and winning elections is spending time hand-wringing, navel-gazing, and finger pointing at what was ultimately an approximately 30/30/40 voter split (as usual) while simultaneously ignoring urgent opportunities to do everything we can to win the house (and perhaps hold the PA senate seat) in the 10th inning via ballot curing efforts. The math isn’t mathing.