The incredible shrinking presidential voter

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The defeat of the Democratic Party is even worse than it first seemed, and that was bad enough.

The reports of presidential voting mostly deal with percentages — the percentage each candidate won by, compared with other elections.

But we should be looking at numbers, not percentages. Numbers are hard facts. Much more than percentages they tell the truth clearly.

And the truth of this election is that many voters stayed home. They were so down on both candidates that they just didn’t vote for either one.

This was more true for voters in Democratic areas than in those places that voted for Trump. A recent article in Minnesota Reformer shows that in Hennepin County this election there were 35,000 fewer voters than in 2020, despite increases in population. And this was the year so often proclaimed as presenting the most important election of our lifetime!

The same article shows that in the nine counties Kamala Harris carried in Minnesota, there were 54,000 fewer votes than in 2020. In the remaining counties (78 out of 87) that went for Donald Trump, there were more voters (27,000) than four years ago.

Undoubtedly, there were some Republicans who chose not to vote for president, too, rather than choose either Trump or Harris. But the locations of the winning candidates, and the fact that the vote decreases were in predominantly the state’s DFL areas, leads to the conclusion that more DFLers and independents chose not to vote than did Republicans.

This is grave news for the DFL Party, and for Democrats nationally, where the same phenomenon seems to apply. In the country as a whole, this year had several million fewer voters than four years ago. It is one thing to have one’s voters outnumbered, but quite another to have them disappear.

We should not minimize the extent of Trump’s victory, which created a new government in Washington. It was indeed a huge and clear rout.

But a large factor in that victory was disappearing Democrats. A party that doesn’t see that is going to keep shrinking and hold on only to a few urban city councils whose behavior drives even more from their party.

The problem is obviously isolation from the concerns of most people, and some disdain for the working class as well. If the woke don’t awake, their sleep will be a long one.

David Lebedoff is a Minneapolis attorney and author of several books, including “The Uncivil War.”