Ask any Democrat why they lost the 2024 election and they will likely tell you: We didn’t turn out our base. And, as evidence, they will point to the fact that Joe Biden got more than 81 million votes in 2020 while Kamala Harris is currently just shy of 75 million.
That 6 million vote delta is the key, they will tell you.
Which, well, not really.
As the terrific Nate Cohn points out in a piece this morning, there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that more was wrong for Democrats in this election than simply a failure to turn out their base.
First, he rightly notes that turnout in the 7 battleground states was not, in fact, down. I did a bit of digging to just check this out — and it’s correct.
Here’s three sample swing states:
Pennsylvania 2024
Trump 3,542,701
Harris 3,421,247
Pennsylvania 2020
Biden 3,461,221
Trump 3,379,055
Georgia 2024
Trump 2,663,117
Harris 2,548,017
Georgia 2020
Biden 2,473,633
Trump 2,461,854
Arizona 2024
Trump 1,770,242
Harris 1,582,860
Arizona 2020
Biden 1,672,143
Trump 1,661,686
Yes, Biden got more votes than Harris in two of those three states. But not by a huge margin. And in Georgia, Harris actually won more votes than Biden even as she lost the state!
Second, Nate digs through the Times polling and concludes this:
It is wrong to assume that the voters who stayed home would have backed Ms. Harris. Even if they had been dragged to the polls, it might not have meaningfully helped her.
How is that possible? It’s because the low turnout among traditionally Democratic-leaning groups — especially nonwhite voters — was a reflection of lower support for Ms. Harris: Millions of Democrats soured on their party and stayed home, reluctantly came back to Ms. Harris or even made the leap to Mr. Trump. And if those who stayed home had voted, it wouldn’t have been an enormous help to Ms. Harris, based on Times/Siena polling linked to validated records of who did or didn’t vote.
Add both factors up and you get this: Concluding that Democrats would have won if they had simply turned out their voters lets the party off the hook. The issue wasn’t, really, turning out Democratic voters. It was that lots of voters who might have considered themselves Democrats in the past were either unimpressed by the party this time around or found Trump’s national populism appealing.
That is a problem with the Democratic brand, not the Democratic turnout operation.
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