If you are reading the news, you might get the impression that Donald Trump got far more support than he did four years ago. He got a little less.
The Trump performance was not a steamroller. It was flat.
I wish people who wrote opinion pieces for national newspapers were better at grounding their readers in numbers. Nothing fancy — just the kind of numbers you’d put on the back of an old envelope to understand a business deal.
Here are the vote totals for the past two presidential elections:
Democrats
2020 — 81.2 million
2024 — 69.3 million
11.9 million fewer votes, a drop of 14.6 percent.
Republicans
2020 — 74.2 million
2024 — 73.6 million
0.2 million fewer votes, a drop of 0.2 percent.
Had they had lost 5 percent of their voters from 2020, Democrats would have won the popular vote.
I’ve been reading the papers, looking for an explanation for why so many people who had voted Democratic did not this time. Some of those voters switched parties. But far more simply stayed home.
I’ve been looking for a convincing explanation and haven’t seen it.
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