It’s Not About Turnout
There’s a popular and wrong theory floating around twitter that Trump’s win can be attributed to “millions of Democrats who stayed home” or “14 million missing Democratic votes”. This theory is, as far as I can tell, the result of a mistake made by people who want to run takes before all the results are in, and shows up most years. It is also extremely wrong, and the evidence so far shows turnout roughly in line with 2020.
Origins of the Take
The laziest possible turnout analysis is to load up the NYT election night page and compare the popular vote numbers at the top to the numbers in the 2020 page.
If you do that, as of right now, you see around 68 million votes for Harris, and around 81 million votes for Biden in 2020. So, 13 million missing Democratic voters, right? No, not right.
The Votes Aren’t All In Yet
Counting votes is a slow process, and some states are slower than others. Unfortunately for election night (and days after election night) takesters, California is one of the slowest. As of 4:30pm on Thursday November 7th, the NYT is showing around 55% of votes counted in CA.
This matters to turnout takes because California is massive and highly Democratic. Missing just under half the votes in CA means that millions of Democratic votes aren’t yet included in that topline popular vote count.
For context on the sheer size of uncounted CA votes, in 2020, there were around 17.5 million votes cast in CA. Right now, there are about 9.7 million votes counted in CA so far. Those extra millions of votes aren’t missing, they’re just sitting in county election offices waiting for the official count to happen.
And this isn’t just a California problem- as of writing this, Oregon is at 77% of all votes in, Colorado at 79%, Arizona at 69%. A lot of the more western states take time to count, and this can make it look like turnout is down when there’s really no evidence of that in states that have fully counted.
What About Where The Votes *Are* All In?
I grabbed a selection of states to check for this, picking ones where most of the votes seem to be in to make it a fairer comparison. I am not including a ton of states here because, frankly, it’s a lot of tedious copy pasting I just haven’t had time for today.
In most of these states, the differences in total turnout look to be a mild increase from 2020, under a hundred thousand votes.
PA is currently showing a slight drop in turnout, by around 12k, but I happen to know that PA excludes all provisional ballots from the count until certification a few days later, and so they are still missing those ballots. (You can see this on their website if you’d like.) Last election, there were around 103k provisional ballots cast in PA, so I have every reason to believe turnout will end up being up from 2020 levels.
(Wapo is helpfully tracking turnout comparisons by state, but they’re trying to compare it to voting eligible population. This is more correct if you’re actually interested in turnout trends, but less useful if you’re trying to debunk that 14 million number. )
Why Turnout Takes Are So Seductive
I had a note about bad turnout takes in my pre-election memo on bad takes you were going to see, and man, they have really come out.
What I said at the time was:
“The usual turnout argument runs like this: We won this election on turnout, by adopting my issue priorities/taking radical or strongly partisan stances/mobilizing our base. You can tell because numerically more people voted in total, especially in highly Democratic areas. This means next cycle we should move more left/focus on consistent Democrats.”
I stand by that, but it does need an edit for turnout arguments in the case of loss. What we’re seeing right now is arguments that go, roughly, “these missing 14 million Democratic votes show we lost because we didn’t excite our base. We need to focus on strongly Democratic voters and move left”.
If you have just lost an election rather badly, and are casting around for answers, this take tells you that the solution is doing what you already want to do, just even harder/with more money. That’s a great answer if you quite like what you were already doing! It’s certainly a lot easier than grappling with the electorate’s dislike of your party and governance, or reconsidering how you can expand the tend to bring in more voters. It’s a nice, convenient answer that completely ignores any real disagreement with your policies or party approach.
It would be nice if we lived in a world where Democrats could solve our political problems by going even harder with our existing base. That is not the world we live in. There’s no good evidence for the “missing voters” theory, and plenty of evidence that more people just voted for Republicans this time. We should work on responding to the world as it is, rather than making up explanations that make us feel better.
