Before the election, a post on a neighborhood social media site praised the Electoral College. That spurred me on to write about that institution on this blog. However, I also responded directly to the post saying that it would be interesting to see the reaction if a conservative presidential candidate won the popular vote but lost the Electoral College. I averred further that we were unlikely to find out because the probability was low that a conservative would win the most votes. The original poster replied that he did not care about the popular vote as long as Trump won. After the election, he gloated that the “conservative” Donald Trump had won the popular vote.

I do confess that I was wrong in suggesting that Trump could not win the most votes, but it was a victory with caveats.

The news analyses shortly after the election were often about groups that had swung to Trump giving him his win. I saw stories indicating that Texas Hispanics shifted to Trump as did more voters in New York City, and that young men went for Trump at a higher rate than young women did for Harris. And so on. The implications were that Trump’s victory was a landslide demonstrating the country’s hard shift to the right.

Is that so?

Trump did win the most votes, garnering at the latest count 76.8 million votes, but it appears that he did not obtain a majority. A few more votes may trickle in, but he did not get above 50%. Harris was not far behind, with 48.3% of the vote. If the country has shifted right, the tilt is less than that of the Pisa tower. In terms of the popular vote, this was the closest election since 2000. The Electoral College may have been a landslide but the popular vote was not, and it is noteworthy that Trump won some of the swing states by tiny margins.

Trump did get 2.5 million more votes than his 2020 total of 74.2 million, but the U.S. population increased by about five million during that span, or 1.5%. Trump’s votes should have increased by 1.1 million from 2020 to 2024 merely because of population growth. He did somewhat better than that and shifts to him are outcomes worth analyzing. But there was a more significant factor.

The real difference in the election was not the collection of new Trump voters but the loss of those who did not vote for Harris. Biden in 2020 got over 81 million votes; Harris had about five million fewer. While some of Harris’s shortfall may have voted for Trump, most of them did not. Many voters, in essence, disappeared, and Trump was the beneficiary. And that, not the new Trump voters, is really the big story.

Many touted the importance of the election, so it is somewhat surprising that the turnout was less by at least a couple of percentage points, than it was four years ago. Ballotpedia.org says the turnout in 2020 was 66.6 % of eligible voters and this year it was three points less.

The fluctuating size of the electorate is a complicated American story. We may pledge allegiance to our democracy or republic, whatever your ideology dictates, but we don’t always value the vote as much as our patriotic proclamations imply. I learned from The Age of Acrimony: How Americans Fought to Fix Their Democracy (2021) by Jon Grinspan that the turnout in the 1896 presidential election was 79.3% of eligible voters. But in the early twentieth century, the percentages fell, bottoming out in 1924 at 48.8%. (Grinspan suggests several reasons for the decline. Surprisingly to me, turnout fell most in the states that had adopted the secret ballot, a late nineteenth-century innovation.)

The percentage of eligible voters who vote has changed throughout our history, and the recent drop perhaps indicates the most important conclusion from the last election: A conservative can win the popular vote if the number of voters, by hook or by crook, is lowered.