Q&A of the Day – Why Was 2020’s Election Turnout Higher than 2024’s?
Each day I feature a listener question sent by one of these methods.
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Today’s Entry: Brian: Wow! Great week last week, ugh? Can you help us understand something? You’re always good with analytics, and have a way of breaking down the numbers in a way that makes things clear for us: My wife has been hitting me with the number of votes in this presidential election verses the last, and says it clearly shows that in 2020, “something was up.” Too many numbers. I can’t follow it.
Are the numbers one more indication that suggest that 2020’s election results were suspect? If so, how?Thanks!
Bottom Line: Thanks for the kind words – I'm happy to dive into this topic. I’ve received similar inquiries from several people as this has been a topic of conversation in many social media circles following Trump’s massive win last Tuesday, the largest victory by a Republican presidential candidate since Ronald Reagan was the president (George H.W. Bush in 1988). It was also a win that surged Republicans into a solid senate majority with 53 senate seats and a likely House majority that’s larger than the current slim GOP majority with a pickup of at least a couple of seats. The House discussion is an instructive place to start this conversation.
- It’s nuts that it’s been seven days since the election, and we still have dozens of House races that have yet to be called because there are millions of votes that have yet to be counted. I think most reasonable people would agree.
- There are in fact millions of votes that have yet to be counted.
So, about that... There are multiple reasons why turnout will be lower in 2024 than it was in 2020, however the fact of the matter is that with millions of outstanding votes to be counted, primarily in California at this point, any raw voter turnout numbers that have been passed around online, have been meaningfully lower than what the final totals will end up being once all votes are tabulated and all provisional ballots are cured across the country. I can pretty reasonably estimate the final vote total at this point; however, I wouldn’t want the estimate to be used out of context similarly to the way that votes totals up to this point have. With that said, let’s address the knowns because it will help to paint the picture.
- In the 2020 presidential election a total of 158,481,688 voters cast ballots
- As of Sunday, midday, a total of 152,967,700 voters had votes tabulated
So again, with millions of outstanding ballots yet to be tabulated the actual vote totals will end up being reasonably close, which should mostly address the concerns. But as for addressing those concerns it’s explainable. The 2020 presidential election featured the highest relative turnout since 1900. Four years ago, 66.6% of the voter eligible population cast a ballot in the election. That was 6.5% higher than the 2016 election. As mentioned, you have to travel back in time to 1900 to find higher turnout with over 70% of voting age Americans participating in the election. Given the historical perspective it’s impressive that we’re tracking at levels that at only slightly below the historical high turnout of the 2020 election. Excluding 2020, it appears as though we’ll end up with the highest turnout since at least 1960.
Now, it’s at this point you might look at 2020’s turnout having been the highest in 120 years and thought that it further confirms that something “was up” in 2020. Well, it was, buts it’s also explainable independent of illegal shenanigans. 73% of eligible Americans were registered voters in 2020. Due to the pandemic, a total of 37 states relaxed voting regulations through emergency declarations due to the pandemic. Five of those states, including the most populous state, California, automatically mailed ballots to every registered voter in their database. This practice led to registered voters who may not have made the effort to vote on their own, to vote to do so. All five of those states saw turnout surge at percentages that were above the national average. California’s, for example, rose 10.4% between 2016 and 2020 leading to well over a million additional ballots being cast in just that state alone.
The five states in question who automatically mailed ballots to everyone registered in 2020: California, Montana, Nevada, New Jersey, and Vermont. Of those states, only Nevada was a swing state, and even had it swung to Trump it wouldn’t have made a difference in the outcome of the election. Also of note, even with ballots being mailed to all voters in several states leading to the highest election turnout of the prior 120 years, there were still 6.4% of registered voters who opted not to vote.
Also of note, the largest swing in turnout from one presidential election took place during the previous pandemic in 1920 – when turnout dropped by 13% from 1916 to 1920 as only Election Day voting was the only option for voters in those days. So, in other words, for the one historical comp we have for holding a presidential election in the middle of a pandemic, the change of turnout was double the size of what we saw four years ago.
Following the 2020 election, I extensively addressed all angles of voter fraud allegations. As I said at the time, the fact of the matter was that voter fraud and shenanigans did take place in that election (there’s literally never been a presidential election cycle in American history without criminal convictions for voter fraud), however, the impact wasn’t sufficient to impact the outcome of the election. The “shenanigans”, a la the mailing out of voter ballots to all registered votes, the extension of deadlines, a la Pennsylvania, etc. were all court sanctioned by state supreme courts and left unaddressed by the US Supreme Court – thus legalizing the change of procedures that helped drive turnout in the name of the pandemic.
It’s my hope that Trump’s historic win puts to bed the broader 2020 narrative. Given everything that Donald Trump has been put through, it’s crystal clear that Democrats were even more bent on keeping him out of office in this cycle as they were in getting him out of office four years ago – and yet look at the election result.