this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2024
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Good question. It would be difficult to calculate. I would start by examining electoral districts to find the ones where voters from the popular majority party in a state have been concentrated by gerrymandered so they will heavily win those districts but lose in most others, enabling the minority party to win that state. Then determine how many votes the gerrymandered party would need to overcome this by winning some of those other districts. Then do this for the whole country and add up the total.
What does gerrymandering have to do with winning a state's electoral college delegates outside of Maine and Nebraska? States award all their delegates to the winner of the states popular vote.
Ok then I'm wrong. How would you estimate it?
I wouldn't. Popular vote doesn't have a meaningful role in determining the presidency.
Popular vote doesn't have a meaningful role in determining the presidency, but all states except Maine and Nebraska allocate their electoral votes according to it. Well alrighty then, you have yourself a good day!
This is the national popular vote.
When states allocate their electoral votes, it's based upon the state's popular vote. So if a candidate gets the most votes in California. If only one person votes for that candidate in California, the candidate gets all the electoral votes in California. If everyone votes in Alaska, the winning candidate only gets Alaska's electoral votes.
The national popular vote isn't meaningful in determining the president. The only determinant is the electoral college.
Sure, the national popular vote total doesn't determine the presidency, but it's also not "meaningless". The popular vote winner has won the presidency all but 5x in US history.
I feel like we've strayed very far from the original statement.
In our electoral college system the total national vote isn't the cause of a president getting elected. Many of the people who didn't turn out were in states that were already considered Democrat strongholds such as New Jersey. Only seven states mattered. They were close enough that the polls weren't able to tell who was in the lead. Both Republicans and Democrats spent a lot of money on spreading their message and getting out the vote. These seven states had record or near record turn out.
In light of all of this, what is your argument?
In simple terms, if those 10 million Democrats had voted for Kamala there's a good chance she would have won. It would depend on where those people live, but even if you simplemindedly divide 10 million by 50 you average 200k votes in every state. This is far more than Trump's lead in any of the swing states, and she only would have had to win a few of them.
I think ten minutes of your time would yield a less simpleminded result.
I'm open to converse about it with anyone who offers an actual conversation.
I'm not following. The only people here are you and me.
Like I've mantained, I don't think the popular vote is important to electoral college. I also think this ten million voter deficit is an allusion to not enough Democrats came out. And if they did, Harris would have won. This assume many things. Worst of all is that the Democrats are owed votes. Doing the actual exercise will only move people towards being more specific about which voter group they blame for the loss. This is wrong.
But if I were to investigate more closely, I'd look at votes for Dems and Republicans in 2020 and 2024 in swing states and compare. If that picture is confusing, I'd expand it to states where turnout was down from 2020 by a significant amount. Significant would be a greater percentage drop in that state from 2020 to 2024 compared to the national percentage drop.
The crux of our argument is that I believe the 10 million Dems who voted in 2020 and not in 2024 were enough to have elected Kamala Harris had they shown up, and you see no merit in this idea. That's fine.
Devoid of state level analysis, it is meritless.
The only possibility to rescue a modicum of merit is to look at the swing states. Even in succeeding to rescue some merit, it is not singular in explaining the outcome. It must be contextualized into the choices of voters without seeing it as just "these Democrats stayed home." It will be messy because disengaged voters are vibe based not party based.