This defies the traditional political belief that Republicans struggle in high-turnout elections. The race between Republican Donald Trump, now the president-elect, and Democrat Kamala Harris, the Vice President, saw over 152 million ballots cast, according to Associated Press elections data.
This figure is expected to rise as slower-counting states like California finalize their tallies, inching closer to the 158 million votes cast in the 2020 presidential contest, the highest turnout since women were granted the right to vote over a century ago.
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"Trump is great for voter turnout in both parties," Eitan Hersh, a political scientist at Tufts University, told ABC News. Trump's victory in both the Electoral College and popular vote, leading Harris by nearly 3 million votes nationwide, challenges the political assumption that Democrats, not Republicans, benefit from high-turnout elections.
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In 2020, Trump himself expressed this belief, warning that a Democratic bill to expand mail balloting would lead to "levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you'd never have a Republican elected in this country again." This statement was made amidst Trump's propagation of conspiracy theories about mail voting during the coronavirus pandemic, which he later used to falsely claim his 2020 loss was due to fraud.
This claim sparked a wave of new laws adding regulations and rolling back forms of voting in GOP-controlled states, and an expansion of mail voting in Democratic-led ones. This battle over turnout became a central part of political debate, leading to allegations of voter suppression from Democrats and cheating from Republicans. However, Hersh dismisses these allegations as "an embarrassing story for proponents on both sides, because it's so obviously wrong."
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Despite the ongoing battle over election regulations, Trump's high-turnout victory may lessen the urgency of this confrontation. "Now I think, you just won the popular vote, I think it'll quiet down," said Patrick Ruffini, a Republican data analyst and pollster who has long argued his party can succeed in a high-turnout election with a diverse electorate.
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Interestingly, the seven swing states at the heart of the election saw even higher turnout than the rest of the country. "This was a campaign in seven states much more so than previous elections have felt like," Ruffini noted.
While the rest of the country shifted significantly from 2020, when Democrat Joe Biden won the popular vote by 7 million, or 4.5 percentage points, the outcome in the swing states was closer. The turnout story also differed. Noncompetitive states like Illinois and Ohio saw a drop in turnout from 2020, while battleground states like Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, all of which Trump won, saw an increase in votes cast.
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Despite Harris matching or even exceeding Biden's vote totals in Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, and Wisconsin, the problem for Democrats was that Trump performed better in the battlegrounds than four years ago. "The Harris campaign did a pretty good job getting voters out who wouldn't have come out," said Tom Bonier, a Democratic data analyst. "She did get her voters out. Trump got more."
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A key part of the GOP strategy was reaching out to voters such as first-time voter Jasmine Perez, 26, who voted for Trump at the Las Vegas Raiders stadium. "I’m a Christian and he really aligns with a lot of my values as a Christian in America, and I like that he openly promotes Christianity in America,” Perez said.
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Conservatives mounted extensive voter registration and get-out-the-vote operations targeting infrequent voters, a demographic that many operatives have long believed would not vote for the GOP. More than half the votes were cast before Election Day this year, according to AP tracking of the advanced vote.
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Andrew Kolvet, a spokesman for Turning Point Action, a conservative group that ran a get-out-the-vote campaign with more than 1,000 workers in multiple battleground states, cited Stacey Abrams, a onetime Democratic candidate for Georgia governor, as an inspiration in his group's effort. "We saw that Trump has this amazing reservoir of low-propensity conservatives who needed a little coaxing," Kolvet said. "They didn't think their vote mattered, and their No. 1 pushback was they didn't understand, really, how to vote."
Kolvet acknowledged that conservatives long believed large turnout didn't help them but contended that's changed in the Trump era: "Our ideas are more popular," he said. As for whether this trend continues, Kolvet believes it's up to conservatives to deliver on their campaign promises.
