My substack is about abortion rights and Virginia, but I really want to address the issue about the election being a mandate or a landslide victory for the red vote, or orange vote. I read on Jessica Valenti’s substack Abortion, Every Day that Republicans think that abortion is a non-issue now because reproductive rights didn’t win the presidency in the election, because they say it was a landslide election.
The November 2024 election was not a landslide!
Abortion is still very much an issue, in Virginia, and nationwide. See last week’s post about why Virginia is so important to abortion rights right now.
I drew two maps (well, I filled them in, beautifully I might add). One shows how the votes broke out between Republicans and Democrats. The other shows the total votes in each state, not eligible voters, but the numbers of voters that ACTUALLY voted.
The main points of this post are:
The election was not a landslide and not a mandate at all. Trump beat Harris by 2.6 million votes. Biden beat him by more than 7 million votes. Hilary actually beat Trump by 2.9 million votes.
More people voted against Trump than for him. 77.3 million voters voted red, 77.6 voters voted either Harris or third party.
More people didn’t vote than voted for any candidate. 36% of eligible voters did not vote.
The map above shows how votes were spread between Republican and Democrat votes in November 2024. The number shows the percentage of the vote that went to the winner. If the number is written on the red part, it was a Republican win, and if it is written on the blue half, it was a Democrat win. All of the geographically small states that I had to write on the outside of the map went Democrat, so I wrote them in blue.
I filled in this map with magic markers and just estimated the size of the red and the size of the blue. It’s just an estimate, but you can see it’s more like half and half between red and blue across the country.
Here’s another map that shows the number of people in each state that cast ballots. This is not eligible voters, but eligible voters who actually voted in November.
So, looking at the first map, you will see a state that is big like Wyoming and see that 72% of voters voted for Trump and only 56% of voters in New York voted for Harris. But, looking at this map, you can see that Wyoming’s 72% is only 72% of 300,000 voters which is 200,000 votes while 56% of New York’s 8.2 million voters is 4.6 million votes.
Below is the table of information about the votes in November. The last three columns on the right show where I got percentages for the first map. The fourth column shows how many people in each state voted.
Some interesting things to note:
77.3 million voters voted for Trump and 75.0 million voted for Harris. 2.6 million or 2% of voters voted for a third party or “other” candidate.
6 million people voted for Trump in Florida, Texas AND California. When Trump was treating Californians like they were a pariah because California went Democrat (9 million voted Democrat) and toying with the idea of withholding FEMA aid for the wildfires, he was also hurting 6 million of his own voters.
More people voted for Harris in Florida (4.7M) which went for Trump than in New York (4.6M) which went for Harris.
The previous table looked at how the actual votes broke out by percentages. It didn’t include the eligible voters who did not vote. The following table looks at how all eligible voters voted and includes those who did not vote. The four columns on the right show what percentages of eligible voters voted for red, blue, other, and those who didn’t vote at all.
Some interesting things to note:
32.0% of eligible voters voted for Trump
31.1% of eligible voters voted for Harris
1.1% of eligible voters voted third party or “other”
35.9% of eligible voters did not vote, at all!
In 22 states, more eligible voters didn’t vote than voted for either Trump or Harris.
In 11 states, 40% or more of eligible voters didn’t vote.
The biggest takeaway here is that 36% of eligible voters did not vote at all!
More voters didn’t vote than voted for either Trump or Harris!
30% of voters in Virginia did not vote. And that was in a presidential election. My goal with this substack is to try to get as many pro-choice voters out as possible in the state elections this year in Virginia, on November 4, 2025. Please share this with your friends and family in Virginia.
Population Data from StatsAmerica.org
Vote and Voter Data from the New York Times.
Thank you for this post. It makes me crazy to see all the people who DIDN'T vote. We could be a completely different country right now.