Kamala Harris failed to improve on President Joe Biden’s national performance in the 2020 election, earning 9 million fewer votes and losing swing states that the president carried just four years ago.
According to latest vote counts, Harris has ended up with 72.4 million votes to Trump’s 75.6 million votes.
While media members and political experts are labeling Trump’s win sweeping, Harris lost the election by less than a million votes in the key swing states. If those votes went her way, she’d be the president-elect today even without winning the popular vote.
President-elect Donald Trump won 3.2 million more votes than the Democratic nominee in the race for most total votes. Such a close popular vote is not unusual for the 21st century, where presidential elections have often come to a knife’s edge in recent years. A deeper look at the results in key states from the 2024 races shows just how close Harris could have made it to the presidency.
In 2016, Hilary Clinton won the popular vote by 2.1 percent; though Trump ultimately won the electoral college.
In 2020, however, Trump faced a resounding victory as Biden secured a 4.4 percent margin in the popular vote and a strong electoral college.
President Joe Biden carried six of seven swing states in the 2020 election, but Vice President Kamala Harris lost them all to Donald Trump in 2024. Despite the losses, Harris was less than one million votes in key areas from winning the presidency (AP)
Despite the popular vote, Harris could have won the 2024 — or at least made it signficantly closer — if she had just maintained Biden’s figures in a few key states such as Pennsylvania and Michigan.
This year, Harris lost to Trump by only 780,000 votes in the swing states, compared to 3.2 million nationally under current vote counts. So it would have taken the VP flipping just under one million votes into those areas to be the president-elect today.
In three swing states her campaign needed to win, Harris managed to build on support for Biden in 2020. But Trump fared even better winning more votes and seeing larger growth, and the Democratic ticket lost votes in the battlegrounds.
Michigan
Michigan was one of the closest races this year, won by just 1.4 percent and 80,000 votes.
In fact, Harris lost exactly around 80,000 votes from Biden’s lead in 2020; with Biden and Trump both winning with 2.8 million votes in consecutive elections.
Of all the swing states, Michigan presents the clearest case forwhere the Democrats could have held on to 15 electoral college votes, if Harris had been able to maintain Biden’s support. Doing that would have switched a key battleground state in her favor and made the race closer than the final tally showed.
Despite winning comfortably over Trump in Michigan’s metropolitan areas, as is expected for Democrats, Harris lost tens of thousands of votes in these hubs that would have otherwise pushed her over the line.
In Wayne County, which houses Detroit, Harris shed over 60,000 votes from Biden’s 597,000 in 2020. She lost another 20,000 votes across the neighbouring blue counties of Oakland and Genesee, between Detroit and Flint.
Combined together, these 80,000 lost votes in Democrat strongholds would have given Harris an extra 16 electoral college votes; leaving Trump at 296, and Harris at 242.
Wisconsin
Harris was only around 30,000 votes behind Trump in Wisconsin, which has 10 electoral college votes.
Biden defeated Trump in the state by roughly 20,000 votes in 2020. The president received 1.63 million votes to Trump’s 1.61 million.
This year, Harris received 1.66 million votes — roughly 37,000 more than Biden did, and the most received by any Democratic candidate in the state since Barack Obama in 2008. However, it wasn’t enough to win the state as Trump racked up 1.69 million votes.
In Door County specifically, a rural area that Biden flipped in 2020, Harris gained more than 500 votes from her predecessor; and she increased votes in Portage County by 1,000.
In Wisconsin, the issue does not appear to be that Harris didn’t get enough votes — but rather, that Trump managed to build his base at a faster rate.
Trump turned out more than 87,000 more votes in the state than he did four years ago.
Georgia
Biden flipped Georgia in 2020, marking the first time a Democratic presidential candidate carried the state since Bill Clinton in 1992, and the first Democratic candidate who wasn’t from the South to win any state there since John F. Kennedy in 1960.
Nearly 5.3 million voters cast their ballots in Georgia’s presidential election this year, shattering a previous record set during the 2020 election. Roughly 64 percent of registered voters participated.
The president earned 2.47 million votes in the state in 2020. Harris received even more in 2024, earning an extra 74,000 votes.
Donald Trump rallies in Macon, Georgia, on November 3. He won the state in 2024 after losing it to Joe Biden in 2020, which marked the first time a non-southern Democratic candidate carried the state in 60 years. (AFP via Getty Images)
Trump, however, received 2.66 million votes — adding nearly 200,000 more votes to his 2020 total.
Three Georgia counties flipped to Trump this year: Baldwin, Washington, and Jefferson.
All three counties are located between Macon and Augusta, bordered by Democratic-leaning counties to the north and Republican counties to the south. Between the three counties, Harris only lost a few hundred votes from Biden’s support, which which would still be nowhere near enough to fill the 116,000 gap from Trump.
Pennsylvania
Harris did not improve on Biden’s performance in Pennsylvania, the largest of the swing states, with 19 electoral college votes at stake in a highly contested battleground where she lost to Trump by roughly 1.9 percent of the vote.
In fact, Harris lost 71,000 votes compared to Biden, who is a Pennsylvania native.
In Philadelphia and neighboring counties of Bucks, Delaware and Chester, Harris lost approximately 67,000 votes from 2020.
Though Harris won by 1.9 percent in Biden’s hometown of Lackawanna County, it was far from the president’s 8-point win in the county in 2020.
In 2020, Biden defeated Trump by a slim margin in Pennsylvania overall, earning 3.45 million votes to Trump’s 3.37 million.
This year, the vice president received 3.38 million votes. Trump received 3.52 million.
Just under 135,000 votes sat between the Democrats and 19 electoral votes. If Harris had kept Biden’s numbers and the 71,000 votes, she would have needed to just turn a few more thousand to win the key battleground state.
North Carolina
In North Carolina, Biden received 2,684,292 votes, coming in roughly 75,000 votes below Trump, who won the state in both 2020 and 2024.
This year, Harris received 2,688,797 votes in North Carolina — improving on Biden’s numbers by just a few thousand votes, but failing to keep pace with the growing support for Trump, who received 2.8 million votes and added 189,000 to his total.
It is also worth noting that North Carolina’s population grew by an estimated 3.5 percent since 2020, which makes Harris’s 0.1 percent gain negligible.
The majority of North Carolina’s counties swung more to the right this year; once again suggesting that Trump expanded his support base, particularly in rural areas. Trump also managed to flip Anson County, an area which hasn’t supported a Republican since the 1970s.
This spells danger for the Democrats in the future if the area stays red; North Carolina holds 16 votes which are essential for breaking through the electoral college majority.
Arizona
Arizona is the state where Trump made the smallest inroads from 2020; yet while he gained only 51,000 votes, Harris lost over 144,000 compared to Biden’s 2020 totals.
The state has faced delays to vote counting and 4 percent of votes have not yet been added, meaning that these numbers are subject to change. Trump has won Arizona with 1.71 million votes so far to Harris’s 1.53 million votes, ending with his strongest battleground margin of 5.7 percent.
Trump flipped the key county of Maricopa, where most of the state’s population lives, and he strengthened his hold in others like Navajo and Cochise.
Meanwhile, in Apache County, which has a 73 percent Native American population, Harris won by just an 18-point margin, down from Biden’s 34-point margin in 2020.
Apart from 2020, Arizona had voted Republican in every election since 1996. With Trump’s victory this year, it may be that the state will no longer be considered a likely battleground.
Nevada
In Nevada, Harris lost approximately 1,800 votes from Biden in 2020, while Trump improved by over 70,000. Overall, Trump has received 779,000 votes while Harris received 701,000, a margin of 3.1 percent.
Clark County, home to the Las Vegas metropolitan areas and more than 1 million votes, leaned towards Harris by 27,000 votes.
The only other county to go for Harris was Washoe, where Harris won by under 2,000 votes. Biden had far stronger performances in both counties.
