There are too many media outlets that are reporting that the United States has shifted towards Trump, but that isn’t entirely true. A true shift would be if Trump had substantially more votes than he did previously, like in the 2020 elections. He doesn’t. Rather, Kamala Harris received far less votes than Biden did in 2020. The amount of people that voted for Trump is roughly the same. As if I could not cringe any further, a recent LA Times Article has the audacity to suggest California has shifted rightward. The percentages for 2024 is 58.6% (Harris) and 38.2% (Trump), while 2020 is 63.5% (Biden) and 34.3% (Trump). But that doesn’t tell the whole story. The percentages suggest a shift, but the absolute number of votes do not. 2020’s results in CA for Biden is 11,110,250 votes and 6,006,429 for Trump. For 2024 in CA, Harris has 9,214,282 votes and Trump has 6,017,499.
Astonishing! Trump has 11,070 more votes! Rightward shift! Nope. What these numbers suggest is that more Democrat voters sat out the election than in 2020, and this goes for the whole country. California is practically a given for Democrats anyway, but it is absolutely disconcerting that there were millions of less voters; had Harris had the same amount of Democrat voters in California alone, she would be behind in the U.S. popular vote by only 581,035 votes instead of nearly 2.4 million. The failure of a great outcome for the 2024 elections isn’t because there were significantly more Trump supporters, but because there was millions of less Democrat voters.