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 just under 68 million votes, more than 13 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."
https://www.newsweek.com/joe-biden-millions-voters-kamala-harris-trump-election-1981954