The Democratic voters who stayed home

Preliminary analysis by the Wall Street Journal points to a stunning drop in turnout among Democratic voters in the United States on 5 November.

The Republicans swept the elections for president, Senate and possibly the House of Representatives (counting continues in several districts). The precise reasons for their victories will become clearer in coming months as the results are dissected and more data comes to light.

But one statistic, highlighted by staff writers John West and Kara Dapena, already appears to be among the most significant: voter turnout declined by around 6 percentage points in counties won easily by President Joe Biden in the 2020 elections. By contrast, in counties won by then-President Trump by more than 10 percentage points, voters turned out at higher rates this year—despite overall voter turnout being down across the country.

To put it a little simplistically: Trump motivated Republicans more than Harris motivated Democrats.

For example, in counties with the highest share of Black residents, college residents, Hispanic residents or union members, voter turnout dropped by more than the national average. In particular, voter turnout was down by an estimated 4.7 percent in counties with the lowest median income, and by nearly 4 percent in counties with the highest share of Black voters.

In working-class Detroit, behind Memphis the second-largest majority Black city in the US, the city clerk only a week before the election predicted a record turnout. In the end, Democrats overestimated Kamala Harris’s pulling power in the devastated city, turnout being reported as 47 percent of eligible voters, compared to the Michigan statewide turnout of more than 73 percent, which was a record high.

“People don’t feel like they’re put back together coming out of the pandemic”, Branden Snyder, director of Michigan Election Defense Coalition, told Malachi Barrett from local news outlet BridgeDetroit. “[Harris’s] policy platform was more robust than Trump’s; he wasn’t offering any specifics. People were looking to hear what can government do, what can she do. That was a miss. There wasn’t enough conversation about the rising cost of rent, student tuition, good jobs.”

This sort of anecdotal feedback is common in media reports across the country. It confirms election day surveys, and polling for months in advance, showing that the economy was a decisive issue.

Yet Democrats spent a great deal of energy trying to win over affluent Republicans—the so-called never-Trumpers—who are much closer ideologically to the elites who control the Democratic Party apparatus: wealthy donors and politicians in bed with the national security apparatus.

There will be other stories to tell from this election, such as what now seems a clear and consolidated shift among Hispanic voters to the Republican Party, and the further fraying of working-class support for the Democrats.

But nothing thus far tells the story quite like Harris underperforming Biden by millions of votes.