Big voter turnout this year benefited Republicans, contradicting conventional political wisdom
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The 2024 presidential election featured sky-high turnout, approaching the historic levels of the 2020 contest and contradicting long-held conventional political wisdom that Republicans struggle to win races in which many people vote.
The 2024 presidential election featured sky-high turnout, approaching the historic levels of the 2020 contest and contradicting long-held conventional political wisdom that Republicans struggle to win races in which many people vote.
According to Associated Press elections data, more than 152 million ballots were cast in this year's race between Republican Donald Trump, now the president-elect, and Democrat Kamala Harris, the vice president, with hundreds of thousands more still being tallied in slower-counting states such as California. When those ballots are fully tabulated, the number of votes will come even closer to the 158 million in the 2020 presidential contest, which was the highest turnout election since women were given the right to vote more than a century ago.
“Trump is great for voter turnout in both parties,” said Eitan Hersh, a political scientist at Tufts University.
The former president's victory in both the Electoral College and popular vote — Trump currently leads Harris by nearly 3 million votes nationwide — also contradicts the belief in politics that Democrats, not Republicans, benefit from high-turnout elections.
Trump himself voiced it in 2020 when he warned that a Democratic bill to expand mail balloting would lead to “levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.” That warning came as Trump began to sow conspiracy theories about using mail voting during the coronavirus pandemic, which he then used to falsely claim his 2020 loss was due to fraud.
That claim led to a wave of new laws adding regulations and rolling back forms of voting in GOP-controlled states and an expansion of mail voting in Democratic-led ones, as the battle over turnout became a central part of political debate. Such laws usually have a miniscule impact on voting but inspired allegations of voter suppression from Democrats and cheating from Republicans.
“It's such an embarrassing story for proponents on both sides, because it's so obviously wrong,” Hersh said.
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