![[OC] U.S. Presidential Election Results as Percentage of Voter-Eligible Population, 1976-2024](https://www.byteseu.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/7rgvs23bleve1-1536x1536.png "[OC] U.S. Presidential Election Results as Percentage of Voter-Eligible Population, 1976-2024")
Update of previous post. U.S. Presidential election results, including all eligible people who did not vote. Employs voter turnout estimates to determine an estimated population of eligible voters, then calculates election results (including "Did Not Vote" and discounting "Other" votes of little consequence) as a percentage of that. Proportions were rounded to thousandths (tenths of a percent) and reflect minor discrepancies due to rounding in reported voter turnout and vote share data.
2024 Results as of April 17, 2025 https://www.fec.gov/introduction-campaign-finance/election-results-and-voting-information/
University of Florida Election Lab (UFEL) https://election.lab.ufl.edu/2024-general-election-turnout/
- Voting Eligible Population: 244,666,890 (VEP, UFEL)
- Ballots counted: 156,733,610 (UFEL, 64.06% turnout)
- Non-voters: 87,933,280 (UFEL, 35.94% inverse of turnout)
- Donald Trump: 77,302,580 (FEC)
- Kamala Harris: 75,017,613 (FEC)
- Other: 2,898,484 (FEC, explicitly cast for a candidate)
- Base: 241,768,406 (=VEP-Other)
Results in the following percentages (discounting Other):
- Donald Trump: 31.97%
- Kamala Harris: 31.03%
- Non-voters: 36.37%
NOTE This chart tries to strike a balance between simplicity and apparent accuracy. Ultimately, the population of eligible voters is estimated, and more precise factors of that do not make the ultimate estimates more accurate. So, numbers were rounded to integers, which might all round down in one row but up in the next. Unfortunately, this seems to lend to a loss of faith in the veracity of the chart, even though the larger message is more important than its excruciating detail.
Uses R for fundamental data aggregation, ggplot for rudimentary plots, and Adobe Illustrator for annotations and final assembly.
Sources: Federal Election Commission (FEC), Historical Election Results: https://www.fec.gov/introduction-campaign-finance/election-results-and-voting-information/
University of Florida Election Lab, United States Voter Turnout: https://election.lab.ufl.edu/voter-turnout/
United States Census Bureau, Voter Demographics: https://www.census.gov/topics/public-sector/voting.html
Methodology: The FEC data for each election year will have a multi-tab spreadsheet of Election results per state, detailing votes per Presidential candidate (when applicable in a General Election year) and candidates for Senator and Representative. A summary (usually the second tab) details nationwide totals.
For example, these are the provided results for 2020:
- Voting Eligible Population: 240,628,443 (VEP, UFEL)
- Ballots counted: 159,729,160 (UFEL, 66.38% turnout)
- Non-voters: 80,899,283 (UFEL, 33.62% inverse of turnout)
- Joe Biden: 81,283,501 (FEC)
- Donald Trump: 74,223,975 (FEC)
- Other: 2,922,155 (FEC, explicitly cast for a candidate)
- Base: 237,706,288 (=VEP-Other)
The determination of "turnout" is a complicated endeavor. Thousands of Americans turn 18 each day or become American citizens who are eligible to vote. Also, thousands more die, become incapacitated, are hospitalized, imprisoned, paroled, or emigrate to other countries. At best, the number of those genuinely eligible on any given election day is an estimation.
Thoughtful approximations of election turnout can be found via the University of Florida Election Lab, which consumes U.S. Census survey data and then refines it according to other statistical information. Some of these estimates can be found here:
https://election.lab.ufl.edu/dataset/1980-2022-general-election-turnout-rates-v1-1/
Per the Election Lab's v.1.2 estimates, the Voting-Eligible Population (VEP) demonstrated a turnout rate of ~66.38%. The VEP does not include non-citizens, felons, or parolees disenfranchised by state laws.
Once we have the total votes and a reliable estimate of turnout, it is possible to calculate non-voters as the ~33.62% who Did Not Vote (the obverse of the turnout estimate). In the instance of the 2020 election, this amounts to about 81M who were eligible on election day but declined to vote.
To calculate the final percentages for this chart, votes for candidates that received less than 3% of the total eligible population were removed. This was done for simplicity. So, for the year 2020, the results were:
- Joe Biden: 34.19%
- Donald Trump: 31.22%
- Non-voters: 34.03%
Note that these numbers do not necessarily add up to 100%. This is the result of rounding errors and the discounting of "Other" votes. As a result, some of the segments of the bars do not align exactly with segments of the same value occurring in adjacent bars. This visual discrepancy may seem concerning, but is expected.
Posted by ptrdo
48 Comments
I had never seen a graph like this that shows the people that didn’t vote. That’s maddening.
Ross Perot was truly an outlier: The only remotely feasible 3rd party run (and excellent comedy fodder for the likes of [Dana Carvey](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_RtNzJyAJk))
Still bit of a robbery that Hilary actually didn’t win, but her campaign should have done better in the swing states. Question is if we would have been in the current situation had she actually won, would Trump have won the next one, maybe, would be he have been elected again, probably not.
My fellow Americans has no sense of civil duty, it’s sad to see %s in the 20s picking these ghouls to drive us off a cliff.
Love a great way to visualize the “red wipeout total culture victory” that was 2024 lol
It’s like 2000 was a wake up call to people to vote, then 2016 was another.
Also, half of eligible voters not voting in 80s is wild to think about. We think it’s bad now
What that means is that about 67% of the nation did not vote Trump, nor Harris. (But 100% of the nation has an opinion)
We really should only report results like this because it really illuminates that nobody every truly gets a mandate and they should govern accordingly.
Wild that Biden was the first (and only) modern president to beat the “did not vote” cohort.
Biden is the only one that beat non voters lmao, ppl hated that man for all the wrong reasons
So Biden was the only candidate to get more votes than those didn’t vote? Wow!
For me (and many in Ireland), if you don’t vote, you have no right to an opinion. This was the case about an election some time back; my friends and I ganged up on another: ‘Whist! No vote, no opinion’.
Of the cohort who didn’t vote in 2024, better get their arse to the ballot box in 2026 for the Mid-terms. Look at what not voting does—elects an overweight Oompa Lumpa who is fucking everything.
Disclaimer: the Oompa Lumpa *could* have still won but the chances would have reduced.
Why are the number of decimals in the percentage so inconsistent
It would be interesting to see out of the Didn’t vote, how many were actually in swing states that would’ve swung the election. In deep red or blue states I can imagine why many people don’t feel the need/impact to vote
Huh, Harris actually did better than you’d expect based on how much of a blowout the Electoral College was that election. Makes you wonder if a slightly different campaign strategy would’ve given her the win. 😭
Blows my mind that a lot of people on the IS don’t vote either because of apathy or voter suppression. Very fucked up.
It’s not clear to me that engaging people who don’t vote will help democrats. Let’s look at the elections with greater than average turnout:
1992. The increased turnout seems to have gone exclusively to Perot. Bill Clinton got the exact same percentage of the vote at 42% turnout as he did as at 48% turnout.
2004. Higher than normal turnout, Republican trifecta.
2008. Higher than normal turnout because of Obama. Democratic trifecta
2012. Higher than normal turnout because of Obama. Democrats win
2016. Higher than normal turnout. Republican trifecta.
2020. Highest turnout of all time. Possibly due to covid? Democratic trifecta
2024. Next highest turnout of all time. Republican trifecta.
Now, that looks pretty even. If we think that Obama was a uniquely inspiring politician, a once in a generation talent, and exclude his results the result seem to indicate :
**The higher the turnout, the greater percentage chance the candidate favored by low information voters wins.**
The one time (aside from Obama) that higher turnout helped the democrats was during COVID when even the most uneducated and uninformed person could not fail to notice the hundreds of thousands of people dying to COVID under Trump’s watch.
So, I think the hypothesis is borne out both by logic, and by examining historical events, which is why its so odd to see democrats continually pushing to raise voter turnout or even make voting mandatory.
Democrats have won zero unusually high turnout elections when neither Obama nor COVID were ‘on the ballot’.
What do you mean by trifecta? That party won the presidency, house and senate?
Boy that 2020 election sure stands out.
The only time in modern history that a candidate got a higher vote share than undecided.
It’s so dumb, so much as at stake and so many people just don’t care. Apathy towards corruption killed the Roman Empire too didn’t it.
Nearly 37% of the United States population doesn’t give a damn their country and would rather stay home and watch TV and complain about the government than actually do something about it.
If you don’t vote, don’t complain.
And those are just the _presidential_ votes.
Allllllll those downballot races get even less turnout.
Biggest takeaway is unprecedented events that led to a big shift in American society and politics such as 9/11 and COVID are the biggest drivers of increased voter participation. By far the biggest dropoffs in the “Didn’t vote” category were the elections following 9/11 and COVID.
Turnout in battleground states looks a bit better, at 70% for 2024. It makes sense that people in states with overwhelmed majorities of one party would be less likely to vote, especially if they belong to the minority in that state.
https://ballotpedia.org/Election_results,_2024:_Analysis_of_voter_turnout_in_the_2024_general_election
Imagine making a chart that shows what percentage of the vote every candidate got, but you still have to indicate seperately who actually *won* the election…
Not sayin’ it’s incorrect, but it’s wrong.
“Voted for” is a bit misleading, at least on the red side. Really should say “Voted against”….
This chart needs a giant asterisk around 2020 and how it was an anomaly for voter turnout due to COVID. Mail-in voting was at a record high which allowed a lot of people to vote more conveniently than every election before it. However, that went away in 2024, yet 2024 still has record high turn-out compared to every year before 2020.
We’re still far away from having massive voter turnout, but the electoral college system creates a lot of this apathy. There are ~35 states that have voted the same way since 2000, if you take away the “did not vote” percent from these states and only focused on the remaining 15 states, what would this chart look like?
Of course if everyone did vote then maybe we’d see more swing action. Or maybe we’d see how flawed the electoral college system is given how Republicans have only won the popular vote in 2 of its last however-many presidencies. Or maybe we’d see there still is a lot of no-votes from persons discouraged or not feeling connection to either party, and then questions arise on whether that is an acceptable form of action in a democracy.
I really think we should make voting compulsory like Brazil or Australia does. There is no excuse not to vote, and not voting at all invalidates your right to complain about it.
I read recently that “get out the vote” campaigns usually favored democrats – the more voters you could shake out, the better dems do.
RECENTLY the opposite is true – the more marginal voters you get to vote, the better GOP does.
** I do not know if this still holds true after the election
So basically the non-voters won every election?
I wish we had data on here that goes back even further. Has this always been the norm? It’s a real tragedy that the people who don’t care could win any election.
It’s honestly crazy how close the votes are for the two most popular candidates almost every election. Usually within 2-3%.
people forgot about trump in 2024 jesus
I know in political organizing they don’t want people to blame non voters but fucking come on.
You goddamn assholes are just as to blame than Rs.
We’ve got criminal charges against NY AG who prosecuted trump, extrajudicial deportations, a conspiracy theorist HHS secretary, a catastrophic trade war, our closest allies are alienated, the president is getting closer to deporting “homegrown terrorists” aka citizens to other countries – which as we now apparently know – which don’t have to return us once we arrive despite court orders, federal government civil service absolutely gutted without any knowledge of whats even being ended, USAID services abruptly ended disrupting life saving and politically stabliizing aid to the poorest countries and an enormous source of soft power.
Just fuck off. You weren’t motivated to vote? You think your vote just didn’t matter? You “don’t really follow politics”? “They’re all corrupt anyway”?
It is just beyond me to comprehend the utter lack of responsibility, of duty, of care to participate in this country’s continuation. It’s startling and absolutely crushing to really face up to the fact that a third of people in this country just do not give a shit about the most important issues in our lifetimes.
It doesn’t matter, college nullifies everything.
Am I wrong in assuming the “DID NOT VOTE” pile is comprised primarily of Republicans? Voting likelihood goes up with education alongside being Democrat in USA.
see they cheated in 2020. just saying
Short of half of all voters consistently do not vote. With this image, I dare say we deserve what we got.
On the plus side, over time the number on non-voters is going down, so that’s progress.
It’s not really surprising that Biden outstripped those who did not vote given the political climate of the time. Trump had to go… those voters disappeared when they thought someone else will make sure nothing bad happens… so this next presidential election cycle they will show up, because they only vote when it gets inconvenient for them, living in their glass houses, thinking all is well.
Wow, the only presidential candidate to beat out not only his main opponent, but also the “did not vote” category? And getting a higher percentage of votes than even Obama managed to do in ‘08? This Biden guy sure sounds like an electoral juggernaut!
And yet Democrats whole strategy has been to try to peel off a few percent of Republican voters rather than appeal to the 1/3 of the country who feels like nobody cares about them.
The only thing that ever broke voter apathy was the drive to get Trump out of office. Then four years later, people forgot how bad he was somehow…
Ugh. Another thing that has to be considered is what does “didn’t vote” mean. It means people who do not have accessible transportation to get to the polls, People who can not get off work to go vote, People who are hospitalized, People who are in prison. Not just people who shrug shoulders and don’t care (yes there are those too). The ONLY People who voted for things are those that voted FOR those things. Everyone else, did not vote for this.
Considering all the posts I see of bringing up the issue of non voters this election cycle, it’s a bit ironic that this year is actually the year with the 2nd lowest population of non voters. Sure it’s lower than last cycle, but the fact remains that overall more people voted on average and it’s not as bad as say 2016 where nearly half the population didn’t vote. I don’t know what to make of it, but it feels like this is a graph that should be posted more around reddit to show that this perceived issue with non voters has been happening for multiple cycles, and this year isn’t some odd anomaly.
Wow this is a really interesting graphic thanks for sharing it
This is why I don’t get why Americans are trying to make a big deal that Trump wasn’t that popular, people just didn’t vote. Nah, ya’ll voted more than you usually do, you just preferred that monster. Just own who you are at least.
We need to start shaming people who don’t vote