Big voter turnout this year benefited Republicans, contradicting conventional political wisdom

United States election confusion and Community vote or voting crisis concept as hands holding votes casting ballots in a tangled American flag as voters confused with 3D illustration elements.

“It’s such an embarrassing story for proponents on both sides because it’s so obviously wrong,” Hersh said.

Though both sides are likely to continue battling over how elections are run, Trump’s high-turnout victory may reduce the urgency of that 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.

Experts note that turnout in the seven swing states at the heart of the election was even higher than in the rest of the country.

“This was a campaign in seven states, much more so than previous elections have felt like,” Ruffini said.

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 was different. Turnout dropped from 2020 in noncompetitive states such as Illinois, which recorded more than 500,000 fewer votes than in the last presidential election, and Ohio, which reported more than 300,000 less.

Meanwhile, the number of votes cast topped those in 2020 in the battleground states of Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, all of which Trump won. Arizona’s turnout was nearly even four years ago as the state continued to count ballots.

Harris even met or topped Biden’s vote totals in Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, and Wisconsin, and turnout has far eclipsed that of the 2016 Presidential Election when 135.6 million voters cast ballots in a race won by Trump over Democrat Hillary Clinton. The problem for Democrats is that Trump did 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.”

Those Trump turnout victories included first-time voter Jasmine Perez, 26, who voted for Trump at the Las Vegas Raiders stadium.

Diego Zubek, 27, voted alongside her in 2016 but didn’t vote in 2020 because he figured Trump would win easily. He voted for Trump this year.

“I wasn’t going to let that happen again,” Zubek said.

A crucial part of the GOP strategy was reaching out to voters such as Perez and Zubek, encouraging early and mail voting after Republicans had primarily abandoned them in the past two elections due to Trump’s lies about vote fraud. 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.

According to AP tracking of the advanced vote, more than half the votes were cast before Election Day this year.

During the campaign, 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. Abrams’ success in mobilizing Black voters and other groups in her home state that were less likely to vote helped pave the way for Biden’s 2020 win.

“We saw that Trump has this amazing reservoir of low-propensity conservatives who needed a little coaxing,” Kolvet said in an interview Friday. “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.

Whether it continues is up to what happens next in Washington.

“It’s going to be up to conservatives to make good on those campaign promises,” Kolvet said.

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Republished with Permission of The Associated Press.