Vice President Kamala Harris may have lost the 2024 presidential election, but a significant number of Americans voted for her. So many that she is now among the top three U.S. presidential election popular vote getters of all time.
According to Axios, Harris’ vote total – approximately 74.3 million – had surpassed President-elect Donald Trump’s 2020 results – approximately 74.2 million – to clinch the third-place spot as of Thursday. Trump’s approximately 76.8 million 2024 election votes landed him in the second-place spot and Biden’s approximately 81.3 million 2020 election votes put the current president in the top slot.
“The high vote totals for Trump, Biden and Harris relative to previous cycles are due in large part to population growth. But both were also unusually high-turnout elections,” said Axios. Indeed, data provided by the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research showed that overall presidential election popular vote totals have been steadily increasing steadily since the 1940s.
When the late President Franklin D. Roosevelt won against Wendell Willkie in 1940, the total number of overall votes was just shy of 50 million (around 27.3 million voted for FDR, compared to 22.3 million for Willkie). Lower totals were counted in 1944 and 1948, but numbers rose steadily since then. It wasn’t until former President Jimmy Carter beat former President Gerald Ford in 1976 that the overall number of votes reached over the 81.3 million Biden alone received in 2020.
Axios reported that turnout in 2020 was nearly 66%, citing a University of Florida tracker. That dropped this year to 63.7%, though that is still one of the highest turnout percentages in decades.
Former President Barack Obama holds both the fifth and sixth slot for most votes received in a presidential election with 69.5 million in 2008 and 65.9 million in 2012. He’s followed by Hillary Clinton in seventh, and Trump again in eighth. They received 65.8 million and 63 million popular votes respectively in 2016, though Trump won that election via the Electoral College. Former President George W. Bush follows in ninth with 62 million votes from the 2004 election and Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) in in 10th with 60 million votes from the 2012 election.