Strong voter turnout benefited Republicans this year

The 2024 presidential election was marked by record turnout, approaching historic levels of the 2020 election and contradicting the conventional wisdom that Republicans have trouble winning elections in which many people vote.

More than 152 million ballots were cast in this year’s race between Republican Donald Trump, now president-elect, and Democrat Kamala Harris, vice president, according to election data from the Associated Press (AP). .

Additionally, hundreds of thousands more are still being counted in states with slower counting, like California. When those ballots are fully counted, the number of votes will be even closer to the 158 million in the 2020 presidential election, which was the highest turnout election since women gained the right to vote there. more than a century ago.

“Trump is a great way to engage voters of both parties,” said Eitan Hersh, a political scientist at Tufts University in Massachusetts.

Former President’s Electoral College and Popular Vote Victory – Mr. Trump Currently Leading Mr.^me Harris by nearly three million votes nationally – also contradicts the belief in politics that Democrats, not Republicans, benefit from high-turnout elections.

Mr. Trump himself expressed this in 2020 when he warned that a Democratic bill to expand mail-in voting would lead to “voting levels that, if you ever accepted it, you would not would never again have a Republican elected in this country.” The warning came as Mr. Trump began sowing conspiracy theories about the use of mail-in voting during the COVID-19 pandemic, which he then used to falsely claim that his 2020 defeat was due to a fraud.

This claim has led to a wave of new laws adding regulations and reducing forms of voting in Republican-controlled states as well as an expansion of mail-in voting in Democratic-led states, the battle over turnout having become a central element of the political debate. Such laws typically have minimal impact on voting, but have inspired allegations of voter suppression by Democrats and cheating by Republicans.

“This is such an embarrassing story for supporters of both sides because it is so blatantly false,” Mr. Hersh said.

Although the two sides will likely continue to fight over how the election is run, Mr. Trump’s victory with a large turnout could lessen the urgency of that confrontation.

“Now I think you just won the popular vote, I think it’s going to calm down,” said Patrick Ruffini, a Republican data analyst and pollster who has long argued that his party can pull off a high-turnout election with a diverse electorate.

Significant participation in key states

Experts note that turnout in the seven key states at the heart of the election was even higher than in the rest of the country.

“It was a much bigger seven-state campaign than previous elections had made it seem,” Mr. Ruffini said.

While the rest of the country changed significantly from 2020, when Democrat Joe Biden won the popular vote by seven million votes, or 4.5 percentage points, the result in key states was closer. The story of participation was also different. Turnout fell from 2020 in non-competitive states like Illinois, which recorded more than 500,000 fewer votes than in the last presidential election, and Ohio, which reported more than 300,000 fewer votes than in the last presidential election. less.

At the same time, the number of votes cast exceeded those of 2020 in the key states of Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, all won by Mr Trump. Turnout in Arizona was nearly equal to four years ago as the state continued to count ballots.

M^me Harris even matched or exceeded Mr. Biden’s vote totals in Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina and Wisconsin, and turnout far eclipsed that of the 2016 presidential election, when 135.6 million Voters cast their ballots in a race won by Mr. Trump over Democrat Hillary Clinton.

The problem for Democrats is that Mr. Trump did better in key states than he did four years ago.

“The campaign team of M^me Harris did a good job getting out voters who wouldn’t have come out to vote,” said Tom Bonier, a Democratic data analyst. “She succeeded in getting her voters out. Trump had more. »

Focus on advance and postal voting

A key part of the Republican Party’s strategy was reaching out to voters, encouraging early and mail-in voting after Republicans largely abandoned them in the last two elections due to Mr. Trump’s lies about voter fraud . Conservatives have mounted extensive voter registration and voter mobilization drives targeting infrequent voters, a demographic many experts have long believed would not vote for the Republican Party.

More than half of the votes were cast before Election Day this year, according to AP early voting tracking.

During the campaign, Andrew Kolvet, a spokesman for Turning Point Action, a conservative group that led a voter mobilization campaign with more than 1,000 workers in several key states, cited Stacey Abrams, a former Democratic candidate for office. governor of Georgia, as an inspiration for his group’s efforts. The success of M^me Abrams’ mobilization of Black voters and other groups in her home state who were less likely to vote helped pave the way for Ms. Biden’s victory in 2020.

“We saw that Mr. Trump has an incredible pipeline of low-propensity conservatives who needed a little persuasion,” Mr. Kolvet said in an interview Friday. “They didn’t think their vote mattered, and their main argument was that they didn’t really understand how to vote. »

Mr. Kolvet acknowledged that conservatives have long believed that high turnout doesn’t help them, but argued that has changed in the Trump era: “Our ideas are more popular,” he argued.

Whether this trend continues depends on what happens next in Washington.

“It will be up to the conservatives to keep [leurs] campaign promises,” Mr. Kolvet said.