Where did Democratic voters go?

One reason Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election: Democratic voters simply didn't go to the polls.

Voters in traditional "liberal strongholds" failed to show up for Vice President Kamala Harris, said The New York Times. Those strongholds — cities and suburbs, along with traditionally blue states like New Jersey — gave Harris nearly 2 million fewer votes than Joe Biden won four years earlier, while Republican-dominated areas gave Donald Trump an additional 1.2 million votes over 2020. Turnout was also down among traditional Democratic constituencies like Black Christians and Jewish voters. "Many Democrats sat this election out," said the Times.

Harris "tried to build it, but they didn't come," said The Wall Street Journal. It wasn't just Democrats: Overall voter turnout was down from four years ago, but the Democratic losses were "especially sharp." Harris actually did better in the battleground states than in the rest of the country where "turnout plummeted," said the Journal. "What really happened," political science professor John Aughenbaugh told WTOP News, was a "whole bunch of previous Democratic voters were upset with the Democratic Party."

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What did the commentators say?

The election was dominated by "fury from the middle class over how much it costs to get by in today's America," Will Bunch said at The Philadelphia Inquirer. Democrats embraced "big money" instead, highlighting billionaires like Mark Cuban and Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, the latter of whom taunted Trump at the Democratic National Convention by referring to himself as an "actual billionaire." That's not a winning message for a party that built itself in the 20th century "by turning out the working class," Bunch said. It's time to return to those roots and find candidates who "will reject all billionaire and corporate contributions."

"Not nearly enough people turned out to vote for what the Democratic Party was selling nationally," said MSNBC's Jen Psaki, who previously served as President Joe Biden's press secretary. The party's messaging in the campaign's final days — that Trump represented a fascist turn away from democracy — was "geared too much" toward college-educated white voters. "Clearly that message just didn't connect with enough people," Psaki said. Trump, meanwhile, increased his support among every demographic group, including men, women, young people and Latinos. "If that's not a hard truth," Psaki said, "I don't know what is."

What next?

How bad did the election get for Democrats? More self-identified independents went to the polls than Democrats, said Reuters. Independents piled up 34% of the vote — same as the GOP share — while registered Democrats came in at 32% of the electorate. The independent share was up 8 points from 2020, when independents were a "distant third" to both Democrats and Republicans.

The sharp drop in Democratic turnout has fed some conspiracy theories on the left, suggesting that Harris was robbed of rightful votes, said PolitiFact. That's simply not true. "There is no evidence that any votes disappeared," said Ishan Mehta, director of media and democracy at Common Cause. Turnout simply "ebbs and flows" from election to election. If Democratic voters didn't turn out, that just means they "made a decision not to cast a ballot, either not turn out at all, or not check the top contest," said Paul Gronke, a political science professor. "That's the end of the story."