The 2024 Election by the Numbers

Election 2024 is almost over. Electoral College electors convened yesterday in state capitals across the country to cast their votes. The result was what everyone expected, the election of Donald Trump as the forty-seventh president of the United States. With the election now settled—no one expects the certification of the vote to be disrupted on January 6, 2025, as it was in 2021—here is a recap of how the vote went in 2024.

The Electoral College

The formal vote in the Electoral College went as projected. Trump won 312 votes, and Kamala Harris won 226. Unlike in 2016, when seven electors voted for someone other than the candidate they were pledged to, the 2024 Electoral College vote had no “faithless electors.” The 312 votes that Trump received was eight votes greater than what he recorded in 2016, though the difference would have been just six if not for two faithless electors.

Trump flipped six states on his way to winning the Electoral College: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Every other state voted in 2024 as it did in 2020.

The Popular Vote

Trump won 77,284,118 votes, or 49.8 percent of the votes cast for president. That is the second highest vote total in U.S. history, trailing only the 81,284,666 votes that Joe Biden won in 2020. Trump won 3,059,799 more popular votes in 2024 than he won in 2020 and 14,299,293 more than he won in 2016. He now holds the record for the most cumulative popular votes won by any presidential candidate in U.S. history, surpassing Barack Obama. Running three times for the White House obviously helps.

Kamala Harris won 74,999,166 votes or 48.3 percent of the votes cast. That was 6,285,500 fewer popular votes than Biden won in 2020, but 774,847 more than Trump won in 2020.

More than 155 million Americans voted in 2024: 156,302,318 to be exact. That’s the second largest total voter turnout in U.S. history in absolute terms. It is also just the second time that more than 140 million people voted in a presidential election.

In relative terms, voter turnout nationally in 2024 was 63.9 percent. That is below the 66.6 percent voter turnout recorded in 2020, which was the highest voter turnout rate in a U.S. presidential election since 1900. Nonetheless, turnout in 2024 was still high by modern standards. The 1960 election between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon (63.8 percent) is the only other election in the last 112 years to exceed 63 percent voter turnout. If you are wondering, the election of 1876 holds the record for the highest percentage voter turnout: 82.6 percent. That was one of America’s most controversial and consequential elections—and not in a good way. It was also an election in which more than half the adult-age population was ineligible to vote.

Wisconsin holds the place of pride as the state with the highest voter turnout in 2024—76.93 percent of eligible voters in the Badger State voted. Five of the six battleground states that switched from Biden to Trump saw their turnout exceed the national average; only Arizona (63.6 percent) was below, and then just barely. Hawaii holds the distinction of being the state with the lowest voter turnout. Just 50 percent of Hawaiians voted.

A Landslide Election or Not?  

Early election coverage described Trump’s victory as a landslide. But whether you go by the Electoral College vote or the popular vote, it was anything but. The 312 Electoral College votes that Trump won are just six more than Joe Biden won in 2020, twenty less than Barack Obama won in 2012, and fifty-three less than Obama won in 2008. Trump’s Electoral College performance pales in comparison to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s landslide victory in 1936 (523 electoral votes), Lyndon Johnson’s in 1964 (486), Richard Nixon’s in 1972 (520), or Ronald Reagan’s in 1984 (525). In terms of the popular vote, more people voted for someone not named Trump for president than voted for Trump in 2024, and his margin of victory over Harris was 1.5 percentage points. That is the fifth smallest margin of victory in the thirty-two presidential races held since 1900.

Another way to think about whether the election was a landslide or not is to determine how many popular votes needed to shift to change the outcome. As John Quincy Adams, Rutherford B. Hayes, Benjamin Harrison, George W. Bush, and Trump himself can attest, you do not need to win the popular vote to win the presidency. If Harris had picked up the right mix of 229,726 votes in Michigan (80,103), Pennsylvania (120,226), and Wisconsin (29,397), she would be taking the oath of office on January 20. To put that number in comparison, had Hillary Clinton picked up the right mix of 78,000 votes in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, she would have won the Electoral College in 2016. Had Trump picked up the right mix of 65,000 votes in Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, and Nebraska's second congressional district, he would have won the Electoral College outright in 2020.

The 2024 election was the tenth presidential election in a row in which the margin of victory in the popular vote was in the single digits. That is a record. The longest prior streak began in 1876, when seven consecutive elections were decided by single digits. The last person to win the presidency by a double-digit margin was Ronald Reagan in 1984. He won by eighteen percentage points. The last time someone won the presidency by more than five percentage points was Barack Obama in 2008. He won by seven percentage points. The bottom line is that whatever one makes of the mandate that Trump did or did not win last month, the United States remains deeply divided politically.

Early and Mail-in Voting

Early and mail-in balloting remained popular in 2024. A total of 88,380,679 were cast. Fifty-two percent of the early votes were cast in person, while 48 percent were by mail-in ballot.

Not all states track and release early and mail-in ballots by party affiliation. The available data shows that 41 percent of early and mail-in balloting was done by registered Democrats, 38 percent by registered Republicans, and 21 percent by others.

Congress

The good news for Republicans is that they will control both the House and Senate when the new Congress convenes next month. The bad news is that their majorities in both chambers, and especially the House, are small.

Republicans won 220 House seats compared to 215 for the Democrats. That majority is two seats smaller than what the Republicans won in the 2022 midterm elections. The Republicans’ margin of control is also set to shrink next month. Representative Matt Gaetz has said he does not plan to return to Congress after withdrawing as Trump’s pick to be attorney general, and Elise Stefanik and Mike Waltz are expected to resign their seats to join the Trump administration. The special elections to fill those seats, which Republican candidates will almost certainly win, will not come until the spring. That means that the House Republican Conference could have difficulties for the next several months moving major legislation. If just one Republican legislator defects, a united Democratic caucus can block action on a bill.

Republicans will hold fifty-three seats in the new Senate, a pick-up of four seats. The Republicans last controlled the Senate in 2020. The four seats that flipped were Montana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. The fifty-three seats the Republicans hold still leaves them well short of the sixty seats needed to have a filibuster-proof majority.

Women in Congress

The 119^th Congress that convenes on January 3 will have 150 women. That means that 27.8 percent of the members of Congress will be women. The total number of women in the next Congress, however, will be down two from the current Congress. That number will rise to three when Elise Stefanik resigns her House seat to be nominated for U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. And, yes, women’s representation in Congress continues to lag behind that in the national legislatures of many other democracies.

The twenty-five women in the new Senate ties the high set in the 116^th Congress (2019-2021). The House will seat 125 women. That is a drop of two—before Stefanik’s resignation—from the current House. The 119^th Congress will mark a step backward for women in the House on another dimension. For the first time since the 109^th Congress (2005-2006), no woman will chair a House committee. Three women chaired committees in the current Congress. Two of them declined to run for reelection and the third gave up her gavel because of the terms limits that House Republicans impose on committee chairs.

One reason for the shortage of women as committee chairs in the House is the discrepancy between the two parties when it comes to women lawmakers. Democrats will have 110 women in the new Congress, which is up two over the 118^th Congress. In comparison, Republicans, who are the majority party and select committee chairs from their own membership, will start with forty women in the House and Senate. That total is down three members. Stefanik’s resignation will raise that number to four.

Fifty-nine women of color will serve in the 119^th Congress. The record is sixty-one, which is the number in the current Congress. The drop in the number of women of color is the first decrease since the number fell with the 2008 election. Republicans will have five women of color in Congress, while the Democrats will have fifty-four.

For the first time in U.S. history, the Senate will have two Black women senators serving simultaneously. Democrat Angela Alsobrooks became the first Black senator elected in Maryland, and Democrat Lisa Blunt Rochester became the first woman and the first Black senator from Delaware.

Several women elected to the House also set firsts. Democrat Yassamin Ansari will be the first woman of Middle Eastern/North African descent to represent Arizona in the U.S. Congress. Democrat Janelle Bynum will be the first black woman to represent Oregon in the U.S. Congress. Republican Julie Fedorchak will be the first woman to represent North Dakota in the U.S. House. (That means that Mississippi stands as the only state to have never sent a woman to the U.S. House.) Democrat Sarah McBride of Delaware will be the first openly transgender member of the House. Democrat Nellie Pou will be the first Latina to represent New Jersey in the House.

Other Notable Developments

People of color will make up around 27 percent of the new Congress. Excluding non-voting delegates, sixty-five African Americans will serve in the 119^th Congress, up five from the 118^th Congress; fifty-two Hispanic Americans will serve in the 119^th Congress, down one from the 118^th Congress; twenty-two Asian Americans will serve in the 119^th Congress, up two from the 118^th Congress; and four Native Americans will serve in the 119^th Congress, one less than in the 118^th Congress.

The election of Alsobrooks and Blunt Rochester means that the Senate will have five African-American members. The others are Democrats Corey Booker of New Jersey and Raphael Warnock of Georgia, and Republican Tim Scott of South Carolina.

Democrat Ruben Gallego of Arizona and Republican Bernie Moreno of Ohio are the two new Hispanic members of the Senate. Once Gallego and Moreno take their oaths of office, the Senate will have six Hispanic members. Democrats Alex Padilla of California, Catherine Cortez Mastro of Nevada, Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico and Republican Ted Cruz of Texas are the other Hispanic senators. Republican Senator Marco Rubio of Florida will step down to be nominated as Secretary of State.

Democrat Andy Kim of New Jersey became the tenth Asian American to be elected to the Senate. He will join two other Asian Americans in the Senate, Democrats Tammy Duckworth of Illinois and Mazie Hirono of Hawaii.

Looking Ahead

The 2026 congressional midterm elections will be held on Tuesday, November 3, 2026. That is 685 days away. All 435 House seats and thirty-five Senate seats will be up for grabs.

The 2028 election will be held on Tuesday, November 7, 2028. That’s 1,420 days away.

Oscar Berry and Will Merrow assisted in the preparation of this post.