Millions of voters who backed Joe Biden in 2020 apparently did not support Vice President Kamala Harris in this year's election.
Harris suffered a heavy loss to Donald Trump in the 2024 race, with the Republican on course to win the popular vote and sweep all seven of the key swing states.
At the time of writing, with many more votes still to be counted, Harris has 69 million votes, more than 12 million below the 81.2 million votes Biden had in 2020. Trump is currently at 72.6 million, less than 2 million away from the 74.2 million votes the Republican received in the 2020 election. Still, even with the remaining votes yet to be counted, Harris is set to fall short of Biden's tally four years ago.
Newsweek has contacted Harris' campaign team for comment via email.
The race between Biden and Trump saw record-breaking voter turnout, with more than 158 million ballots cast for all presidential candidates across the country. The total number of votes cast in the 2024 race looks set to fall below this, which could partially explain the drop-off in support for Harris. Millions of voters could still be added to Harris' total when the Democratic stronghold of California, which is currently on 55 percent reporting, concludes its counting.
With Trump looking set to receive a similar number of votes between the 2024 and 2020 elections, political commentators and experts are wondering why voters who previously backed Democrats rejected Harris this time around. Others have suggested that many people who supported Biden in 2020 later became disillusioned over the country's high levels of inflation and the cost of living crisis and took their frustrations out on Harris.
Republican National Committee spokesperson Madison Gesiotto Gilbert asked why Harris saw such a sharp drop in voters compared to Biden after Democrats had claimed her "historic candidacy led to a 2008 Barack Obama-like enthusiasm."
"How could you see such a huge vote differential in just a short four-year period?" Gesiotto Gilbert said in a video posted on X, formerly Twitter, on Wednesday. "That's something we've never really seen before."
Danielle Vinson, a professor of politics and international affairs at Furman University in South Carolina, suggested misogyny may have played a part in people not coming out for Harris this year.
"There is a small but significant portion of our country who cannot quite wrap their minds around the idea of a woman being president," Vinson told Newsweek.
"They are fine with women senators or governors, but they pause at thinking a woman can handle national security and foreign affairs. Trump played that up in his comments frequently.
"That may explain some of why Democratic Senate candidates did better than Harris in a lot of states. I can't really think of a policy reason that explains why someone votes for [Democrat] Ruben Gallego for Senate and Donald Trump for President in Arizona."
University of Michigan professor Jonathan Hanson said voters in key demographics, such as minorities and the working class, who felt the economic pinch in recent years ultimately rejected the Democrats on Tuesday.
"Largely, voters have felt economic pain due to the post-COVID inflationary period, and they're taking it out on Biden [and Harris]," Hanson told the BBC.
A similar sentiment was expressed in an opinion piece by Andrew Prokop, senior politics correspondent at left-leaning news site Vox.
"My suspicion is that Harris's electoral struggles were more about Biden's unpopularity and her association with his administration than any newfound love of the American public for the Republican Party generally," Prokop wrote. "Call them the 'I don't like Republicans much, but the economy was better under Trump' voters. Biden lost them, and Harris failed to get them back."
Yousef Munayyer, head of the Palestine/Israel program at the Arab Center Washington, DC, argued before Election Day in The New Republic that the Biden-Harris administration's support of Israel in its war with the Palestinian militant group Hamas in Gaza could end up damaging the Democrats' election chances, even among voters who "are not only Arab and Muslim Americans."
Dearborn, the majority-Arab American city in the key swing state of Michigan, which Biden won with 74 percent of the vote in 2020, voted for Trump in the 2024 election. Harris had 36 percent of the vote while turnout was smaller compared to 2020, according to the Detroit Free Press.
"Trump retained a significantly higher percentage of his 2020 voters than Harris retained of Biden voters in 2020," Munayyer posted on X. "It isn't so much a shift as millions of voters not coming out as they did in 2020."
Vinson added Democrats, particularly in Michigan, seem to have decided to vote for third-party candidates like Jill Stein to "hold Biden/Harris accountable" for their support of Israel.
"There's not much Harris could have said to assuage that group without potentially undercutting the Biden Administration's efforts to negotiate a ceasefire agreement while the campaign was taking place," Vinson told Newsweek.
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Harris formally conceded the election to Trump during a speech at Howard University in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday.
"The outcome of this election is not what we wanted, not what we fought for, not what we voted for," Harris said. "But hear me when I say, hear me when I say, the light of America's promise will always burn bright as long as we never give up and as long as we keep fighting."
Update 11/07/24, 12:32 p.m. ET: This article has been updated with comment from Danielle Vinson, professor of politics and international affairs at Furman University in South Carolina.
