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As regular readers might recall, Biden won in 2020 thanks to a surge of new and less-frequent voters who hadn’t shown up in 2016, and who voted much more Democratic than 2016 voters. These surge voters were the critical “anti-MAGA but not necessarily pro-Democrat” bloc that Harris needed to turn out again in order to win. This year, based on VoteCast data (see chart in the previous section), we can estimate that about 19 million people who voted for Biden four years ago stayed home. (40 percent of those voting in 2024 had voted for Biden in 2020, and 40 percent had voted for Trump. From there, it’s simple arithmetic.16) Moreover, with the same caveats until the voter files are updated, both VoteCast and Navigator found that in the battleground states, a greater share of 2020 Trump voters than Biden voters cast ballots in 2024, albeit by a smaller margin than in the rest of the country. VoteCast also asked whether voters cast ballots “for” the candidate they chose or “against” the other candidate.17 The results show that about 15 million fewer votes were cast “against” Trump in 2024 than in 2020. That suggests a lot of missing “anti-MAGA but not pro-Democrat” voters.