Turnout And The 2024 Election

In the 2020 U.S. presidential election, with COVID-19 still rampaging, widespread non-traditional voting methods were put in place (early in-person voting, expanded mail and absentee balloting). The result was the highest voter participation since 1900—158 million people turned out (65.9% of the eligible population). 

Pundits speculated whether the 2024 election would see a sharp fall-off in turnout in the post-COVID environment. Even though non-traditional balloting methods remained in place, would voters still take advantage of them? We now have the answer.

About 154 million people voted in 2024 (64.5% of the eligible population)—down from 2020, but not dramatically so. As the chart shows, 2024 turnout numbers were just 1.4 percentage points lower than in 2020 and more than 5 percentage points higher than in 2016. Turnout by state varied wildly—with Minnesota showing the highest level of participation and Oklahoma the lowest.

Political scientists will need to pore through the granular data to see which demographic groups showed up and which stayed home. That will tell a lot about why the election turned out the way it did. But one thing is for certain, as long as non-traditional voting methods remain popular, Americans are likely to continue to turn out to vote at high levels.

Election 2024: First Take

Pollsters and political scientists will be studying the entrails of the 2024 Presidential Election for years to come. But, while a range of factors contributed to Donald Trump’s victory over Kamala Harris, only one truly mattered: disenchantment with the economic conditions of the country. This is nothing new—Clinton guru James Carville taught us this 32 years ago.

In this election cycle, the resiliency of inflation and other ‘pocketbook’ issues displaced concerns over reproductive rights and democracy. This was true among almost every demographic group where Trump gained ground—Hispanic-Americans, African-Americans, the young and women (e.g., the vaunted “gender gap” never really materialized). 

Moreover, the inability of the Harris campaign to ‘un-couple’ the Vice President from Biden Administration policies made her the de facto incumbent—responsible for high grocery prices, high gas prices and a general economic malaise. 

There were also strategic and tactical errors in the Harris campaign. Chief among them was the almost obsessive focus on Trumps’s negatives—to the exclusion of selling voters on Harris' own policy prescriptions for the country. Voters were looking for candidates who offered a way out of their economic struggles, but Harris never articulated her solutions well enough. 

Finally, this election may be the first where the so-called “legacy” media lost its influence on voters. The rise of social media offered voters a myriad of non-traditional information sources—on both the left and the right. They used those sources.

All in all, while Americans weighed multiple issues on Election Day, it was almost exclusively their worry over the economy that determined their vote.