Donald Trump will be the 47th president of the United States, and he won not only in the Electoral College, but he’s also poised to get a majority of the popular vote.
And it’s not because he convinced more people to come out to vote for him than did in 2020.
That’s going to stick in my craw to the end of my days.
He’s going to win with the same vote total, give or take, that he got four years ago.
No, it doesn’t make sense.
With 134 million votes already counted, and an estimated 13.4 million still outstanding, turnout will be down in the area of 10 million votes from the record-breaking 2020 election, in which 158.4 million people went to the polls, and Trump lost to Democrat Joe Biden by more than 7 million votes.
Half the remaining votes are in California at this writing, at 3:30 a.m. ET, with Trump leading Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party nominee, by a sliver over 5 million votes nationwide.
Our estimate of how the remaining votes will shake out projects that Trump will win the popular vote by a margin in the range of 3 million votes, and he should end up getting in the area of 74 million votes.
As it turns out, Trump got 74 million votes in his 2020 re-election bid.
In other words, he wins because he got pretty much the same number of votes as he did in 2020, just in a much smaller electorate in 2024.
We saw that trend play out in the two tipping-point states, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Trump will win Pennsylvania with 3.38 million votes; he lost Pennsylvania to Biden in 2020 with just 10,000 fewer votes cast in his favor.
Trump will win Wisconsin with 1.58 million votes; he got more, 1.61 million, in 2020, while losing the state to Biden.
Michigan, the third state in the so-called Blue Wall, is currently going for Trump by a 313,000-vote margin, but is legit still too close to call – I can see enough votes still outstanding that could push Harris over the top in Michigan.
Not that it will matter either way.
The energy visible for Harris in the closing weeks of the race – she had the full stadiums and arenas, the barrage of celebrity endorsements, the ever-growing campaign warchest pumping out content – was a mirage, as was the Democrats’ vaunted ground game, with all of the attention given to the Ds’ early-vote totals and Election Day get out the vote efforts.
Also a mirage: the utter lack of visible enthusiasm for Trump, who was reduced in the final couple of weeks to speaking to half-empty houses that noticeably thinned out as he droned on from the podium, oblivious.
Republicans had no discernible GOTV game, instead putting their efforts into challenging the results in states at the certification level, a much more organized approach to the ad hoc effort to steal the 2020 election after the fact.
They didn’t need it.
Their people got themselves to the polls.
Democrats, with the wind at their sails, with exit polls showing voters were most concerned about protecting democracy and women’s reproductive freedoms, and much less concerned about immigration, the key Trump issue, couldn’t marshal the record-breaking donations, cool rallies and celebrity buzz into getting their people to see what is obviously at stake.
It’s 2016 all over again, basically.
For all the talk about how Trump was not going to be able to get above his 47 percent, because 10 million people didn’t show up, his 47 percent became 50.6 percent, which is what it looks like his final share will be, without having to add to his 2020 raw vote total.
This isn’t to excuse the 74 million people who voted for the candidate convicted of 34 felony counts of fraud, who is facing $450 million in judgments for fraud and defamation, who has promised to extend tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires while also pledging to enact tariffs that will almost certainly lead to crippling inflation, and who has told you that he aims to deport millions of legal immigrants and undocumented immigrants at a cost that will run into the tens of billions of dollars, and achieve nothing.
Too many of them know that Trump, easily the crudest man to ever hold public office, at any level, in the history of these United States, is utterly unqualified to serve as a small-town dogcatcher, much less be elected to a second term as the leader of the country.
We had the votes to end the decade-long national nightmare that Trump and his supporters have wrought.
At least we did four years ago.
The people who sided with MAGA failed us, but we failed us, too.
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Chris Graham
