David Shor, a Democrat data scientist and political consultant renowned for analyzing political polls, has disproven any notion that Kamala Harris lost the 2024 presidential election due to low voter turnout.
Shor, who currently heads data science analysis at Blue Rose Research in New York City, recently discussed the election data he and his team amassed with Vox senior correspondent Eric Levitz.
Democrats have contended, among many other theories, that Harris was the victim of low voter turnout. How, they wondered, could she have won when the number of votes for the Democrat candidate dropped from roughly 81,000,000 (allegedly) to just over 75,000,000?
She couldn’t. Turnout was the key. Such a claim, after all, allows the resistance party to continually cry foul about imaginary efforts by the GOP to suppress votes.
Take this lead by New York Times political correspondent Michael Bendor, for example:
Voters in liberal strongholds across the country, from city centers to suburban stretches, failed to show up to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris at the levels they had for Joseph R. Biden Jr. four years earlier, contributing significantly to her defeat by Donald J. Trump, according to a New York Times analysis of preliminary election data.
That is not the case, says Shor, after diving deeper into the data, with the benefit of added hindsight.
Shor, described by Levitz as “the most influential data scientist in the Democratic Party,” refutes the theory that voter turnout would have helped give Harris the edge.
“The reality is if all registered voters had turned out, then Donald Trump would’ve won the popular vote by 5 points [instead of the roughly 1.6+ points],” he explained.