Not even close to a landslide

I’ve been tinkering with numbers off and on since the election, but I wasn’t sure what I was trying to find. Now I know. While Donald Trump won the election and a fairly large margin in the Electoral College, the popular vote was far from the “landslide” he has been claiming.

What follows is the reason why the Electoral College must be abolished if our right to vote means anything at all.

In the United States in 2024 there were 245 million people eligible to vote. That means they were over age 18 and not felons or undocumented immigrants. Of that total, 37% or 90 million potential voters did not cast ballots on November 5. In fact, 77 million of them were not even registered to vote despite being eligible.

I have to wonder what they were thinking, if they were thinking at all. Our right to vote is one of the more sacred privileges of being an American. (At least it used to be before Trump came along.) To not exercise that right is, well, I just don’t understand. More on that later.

Here are some more statistics you may find interesting. (Some numbers are rounded off.)

                  

Number registered to vote: 168 million

Registered but not voting: 13 million

% Registered who voted: 92%

% Registered not voting: 7%

                                                        

Total number who voted: 155 million

Voted for Trump: 77 million

Voted for Harris: 75 million

Difference: 2 million

                                                        

Number of eligible voters: 245 million

% Voted for Trump: 31.43%

% Voted for Harris: 30.61%

Difference: 0.82%

                                                        

Number of registered voters: 168 million          

% Voted for Trump: 45.83%

% Voted for Harris: 44.64%

Difference: 1.19%

                                                        

Number of actual voters: 155 million 

% Voted for Trump: 49.7%

% Voted for Harris: 48.4%

Difference: 1.3%

 

To recap:

* Among actual voters, Donald Trump defeated Kamala Harris by only 1.3%. In no universe is that a landslide. It's little more than one rock rolling down a hill.

* Neither candidate reached 50% among registered voters with Trump winning by only 1.2%.

* The margin was even closer among all eligible voters, with Trump winning by only 0.82%.

* More than one-third of all eligible voters (37%) did not vote. Nearly a third of them (31%) did not even register to vote, meaning that 77 million people not only failed to vote in the most important election of our lifetime, but they also failed to even try.

* The only “landslide” if you want to consider it as such came in the Electoral College, where Trump got 58% of the ballots compared to Harris’s 42%. A lot of those votes came from states with more farm animals than people.

Clearly, the Electoral College does not reflect the voice of the American people, and that is why it needs to be abolished. That is, if the incoming administration doesn’t throw out the entire Constitution and rule that “we have our leader” so voting is no longer required.

We'll have four years to answer that question.