How do 2024 popular vote totals for Donald Trump and Joe Biden compare to 2020 as of 2024?
Executive summary
The 2024 general-election popular-vote picture shifted meaningfully from 2020: Donald Trump increased his raw vote total by several hundred thousand to a few million depending on the final tally cited, while President Joe Biden did not appear on the 2024 general-election ballot after withdrawing and endorsing Kamala Harris, whose 2024 vote total was several million below Biden’s 2020 total [1] [2] [3]. Analysts attribute the net change to a mix of higher Republican retention and turnout, lower Democratic turnout in key blue states, and sizable flows of new and returning voters toward Trump in 2024 [4] [5] [6].
1. What the headline numbers show: raw totals and who was on the ballot
Joe Biden received roughly 81.3 million popular votes in 2020 while Donald Trump received about 74.2 million in that year, according to widely cited tabulations [2] [7]. In 2024, Donald Trump’s national popular-vote total landed in the high 76–77 million range in major public accounting—roughly 0.3–3 million more votes than he received in 2020 depending on which near-final tally is cited—while Biden was not the Democratic nominee in the general election after withdrawing and endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris; Harris’s 2024 total was about 6–7 million votes fewer than Biden’s 2020 total [2] [1] [3].
2. Turnout and percentages: narrower margins and lower turnout than 2020
Trump’s 2024 popular-vote share narrowly exceeded his rivals’—about 49.8% to 48.3% in one major analysis—producing a close national margin and marking a swing from Biden’s roughly 51.3% in 2020; overall turnout as a share of eligible voters was lower in 2024 (about 63.7%) than it was in 2020 (about 65.8%), which magnified the effect of who showed up or stayed home [4] [8].
3. Where the vote changes came from: turnout drops, retention and new voters
Research from Pew and other analysts finds that Trump retained a higher share of his 2020 backers and benefited from new or returning voters who favored him, while the Democratic nominee in 2024 retained a smaller share of 2020 Biden voters and suffered larger “drop-offs” in turnout—particularly in large blue states—helping explain the raw-vote gap between Biden’s 2020 haul and Harris’s 2024 total [4] [5] [1].
4. Geographic and demographic mechanics behind the totals
State-level analyses show much of the Democratic shortfall occurred in high-volume blue states such as New York and California where the Democratic 2024 nominee trailed Biden’s 2020 totals by hundreds of thousands each, while Trump’s gains were more modest in some of those same states; at the same time, Trump made measurable gains with groups such as Latino voters and with certain male and working-class cohorts, shifting pivotal margins in several battleground states [9] [1] [6].
5. What the changes do and don’t prove about 2020
Observers and fact-checkers caution that differences between Biden’s 2020 total and the Democratic total in 2024 are not evidence of fraud in 2020; post-election counting dynamics and partisan changes in turnout routinely move totals across cycles, and continuing ballot counts in 2024 narrowed early gaps—meaning raw comparisons across cycles must be interpreted through turnout and vote-switching patterns, not as prima facie proof of irregularity [10] [8].
6. Limitations and competing readings
Available reporting provides slightly different tallies for Trump’s 2024 total (the exact margin versus 2020 varies by source) and uses Harris as the 2024 Democratic comparator rather than Biden because Biden withdrew; therefore, assessments of “how much” Trump gained and “how much” Democrats lost depend on which certified totals and state-level counts are used, and analysts differ on how much of the Democratic shortfall was non-voting versus active switching to Trump or third parties [2] [1] [4].