No matter who wins the Electoral College, there’s a decent chance that more Americans will cast a ballot for Kamala Harris than anyone else in U.S. history.
It’s particularly rare to have the same column praised by Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzeziński on MSNBC and Greg Gutfeld of Fox News, but somehow Monday’s Morning Jolt managed to do it.
I think the Morning Joe crew might have interpreted it more generously in favor of Kamala Harris than it was written, but the point stands. As much as Harris might seem like a rambling idiot to the average conservative, she’s still got about a 50–50 chance of being the next president of the United States. She’s got every corner of the Democratic Party and its allies knocking themselves out, pulling out all the stops to elect her, and a huge cash advantage that enables her to outspend Donald Trump’s campaign “on television and digital ads, voter contact efforts, and staff members.” This doesn’t guarantee that she’s going to win; Hillary Clinton outspent Trump, too. And no doubt, she has some gargantuan flaws as a candidate, particularly obvious in interviews and when answering questions, as at last night’s town hall on CNN. But she knows how to dazzle the Democratic Party’s donor class and most of their interest groups. (Blue-collar unions are a notable exception.)
In other words, she may not excite and inspire you, but she does excite and inspire many Democrats. And that might just be enough.
In fact, no matter how the Electoral College shakes out, there’s a decent chance that, next month, more Americans will cast a ballot for Kamala Harris than anyone else in U.S. history.
With the exception of 1988, 1996, and 2012, the total turnout in presidential election years has increased every cycle since 1944. We would expect this, since the U.S. population, including the voting-age population and eligible-voter population, increases every four years.
According to the Census Bureau, the U.S. population today is a bit more than 337 million people; four years ago on this date, we were approaching 332 million.
Since 1996, turnout has jumped between 7 million votes and 22 million votes every cycle. That largest jump came last cycle, increasing from almost 137 million votes in 2016 to more than 158 million votes in 2020.
Let’s assume turnout in 2024 increases to 167 million. Harris is currently at 48.7 percent in the RealClearPolitics average.
The all-time record for votes cast for a candidate is the 81,283,501 that Joe Biden received last cycle; the second-highest is Trump’s total that year, 74,223,975. The third-highest is Barack Obama in 2008, with 69.4 million votes.
Let’s round up Harris’s vote share up a smidge and say that she gets 49 percent. If Harris gets 49 percent of 167 million votes, she’ll receive 81.8 million votes and narrowly surpass Biden; even if turnout grows only marginally to, say, 165 million votes, she would have about 80.8 million votes, the second-highest total of all time.
People can scoff that Harris is only in the spot that she is in because, first, Biden backed himself into a corner by promising to pick a woman running mate. Then the George Floyd riots stirred up enormous, open pressure on Biden — from Democrats such as James Clyburn, Harry Reid, and, one of the early contenders, Amy Klobuchar — to pick an African-American woman.
But, remember, the Bidens did not have warm and fuzzy feelings about Harris before the selection. During the 2019 stretch of the 2020 Democratic primary, Joe Biden fumed that Harris’s debate-stage attack was “some f***ing bulls***.” Jill Biden reportedly wanted to tell Harris to “go f*** yourself.” Biden allies such as Chris Dodd thought her debate attack had been a cheap gimmick.
That’s an enormous hurdle to overcome to be selected as Biden’s running mate. Biden had other, less well-known options — former national-security adviser Susan Rice, then-congresswoman Karen Bass, then-mayor of Atlanta Keisha Bottoms.
And yet, Harris was the pick — in considerable part because, years earlier, Biden’s son Beau Biden, had praised her work as California’s state attorney general. As Biden said when announcing Harris as his running mate, “there is no one’s opinion I valued more than Beau’s.” And of course, former president Barack Obama raved about Biden’s selection. Throughout her career, Harris has impressed the right people at the right time to reach that next rung on the ladder. Chalk it up to luck, chalk it up to charm; whatever it is, she repeatedly demonstrates that word-salad answers have not been a major impediment to her winning races.
Right now, I think Trump has a narrow advantage, and the Democratic panic is real. But it’s still quite plausible that the blue wall holds, that Harris wins that second congressional district in Nebraska, and that, with 270 electoral votes, Kamala Harris becomes the 47th president of the United States.