How does the 2024 popular vote compare to previous elections in turnout and margins?
Executive summary
The 2024 popular vote was narrowly won by Donald Trump, who received roughly 77 million votes (about 49.9%) to Kamala Harris’s roughly 75 million (about 48.4%), a margin of roughly 1.5 percentage points and a raw gap of about 2–3 million votes depending on the source (Brookings; Cleveland.com) [1] [2]. Turnout as measured by the Census Bureau’s CPS supplement was high by historical standards — about 65.3% of the voting-age population — but some analysts note that turnout was slightly lower than the record spike seen in 2020 and that demographic shifts and vote switching, not a massive change in overall participation, produced the swing in margins [3] [4] [5].
1. A close popular-vote result after a high-turnout cycle
The near-final national totals reported by analytical outlets show Trump around 77.3 million votes (49.9%) and Harris about 75.0 million (48.4%), meaning the popular-vote margin was roughly 1.5 percentage points — far smaller than the four-point Democratic edge in 2020 when Joe Biden won by about 4.4 points — and translating into a swing of roughly six percentage points between the two cycles [1] [5]. Officially compiled turnout estimates from the Census’ Current Population Survey put 65.3% of the voting-age population as voting in 2024 (154 million people), which is high historically but below the unusual 2020 turnout spike, complicating simple narratives about a “wave” or collapse of participation [3] [4].
2. Raw vote totals: Trump gained; Democrats’ vote pool was smaller
Multiple post-election analyses document that Trump increased his raw vote total by about three million versus 2020, while the Democratic nominee received fewer votes than Biden did in 2020 — a pattern that helped flip the overall popular-vote margin (Brookings; Cleveland.com) [1] [2]. Analysts and voter-file projects emphasize that this was not driven purely by turnout decline: the electorate’s composition shifted, with measurable defections among younger and some voters-of-color who had supported Biden in 2020, while Trump consolidated or slightly increased support among older voters and others, producing the decisive net movement [5] [6] [7].
3. Where margins widened — the battleground story
Even though the national margin was narrow, Trump’s advantages were concentrated and consequential in swing states: reporting showed his collective margin across seven battleground states of roughly three-quarters of a million votes — a scale far larger than the razor-thin margins that decided some past elections — and those state-level swings delivered him the Electoral College despite the close national popular vote (PBS; [9]; p1_s4). This geographic concentration of gains — and the erosion of Democratic margins among Latinos and younger voters in particular, documented by Catalist and Pew analyses — helps explain how modest national shifts translated into a change in control [6] [7].
4. Polling, interpretation and the limits of the data
Post-election reviews found that pre-election polls generally showed a close race but tended to underestimate Republican support, albeit less dramatically than in 2016 and 2020, suggesting methodological shifts in polling and turnout modeling mattered to expectations (Wikipedia summary of polling review) [8]. Some commentators have pointed to anomalous turnout patterns — for example, claims that the voting-eligible population grew while turnout fell slightly in raw votes — but those claims rely on specific datasets and interpretations (Election Lab cited in a commentary) and do not, by themselves, overturn the broader consensus that the 2024 result came from modest but decisive shifts in vote choice and coalition composition rather than from a large, unexplained collapse in turnout [4] [3] [5].