Way back on October 24, I wrote, “In fact, no matter how the Electoral College shakes out, there’s a decent chance that, next month, more Americans will cast a ballot for Kamala Harris than anyone else in U.S. history.”

That obviously did not come to pass. But Harris has, as of this writing, the fourth-most votes of any presidential candidate in U.S. history, the most by any woman, and the second-most by any Democrat, ever. She’s won about 4 million more votes than Barack Obama in 2008, 7.2 million more votes that Obama in 2012, 7.3 million more votes than Hillary Clinton, and 10.1 million more votes than Donald Trump in 2016.

Harris is 543,506 votes away from tying the third-highest vote total in U.S. history, Trump’s 74.2 million in 2020. She probably won’t reach that threshold; as of November 15, California has 128,500 ballots left to “process,” or in other words, count. The overwhelming majority of states have 99 percent or so of their ballots counted.

You can argue that Harris is an idiot. But simply by virtue of being the Democratic nominee in the most recent year, and running against an opponent Democrats loathed, she was guaranteed to have a near-record vote total. And while Trump’s victory was an indisputable romp, Harris came within 29,687 votes of winning Wisconsin, 79,568 votes of winning Michigan, and 130,584 votes of winning Pennsylvania, In other words, if about 241,000 votes in three states had gone the other way, Harris would be president. That’s not the closest election in U.S. history, but those figures – and the closeness of the U.S. House of Representatives elections, where Republicans will probably finish with 222 seats — does indicate that the Democratic Party is not quite as dead and buried as some jovial Republicans would like to believe.

I’m enjoying the infighting, finger-pointing, and blame-throwing among the Democrats as much as anyone, and as noted yesterday, the argument that “if Nancy Pelosi were still leading House Democrats, they would have won back the House” is particularly deluded, considering she’s lost a House majority twice. But no party stays down for too long in American politics; Democrats will, someday, learn from their mistakes, moderate and embrace more popular policies, and nominate better candidates.

Shortly after Election Day, the conspiratory-minded compared the 2020 vote totals to the preliminary vote totals from 2024, and argued that 20 million fewer Americans had voted this year, which they contended was ipso facto evidence that Democrats had cheated four years ago. Then the argument shifted to 10 million fewer voters than four years ago.

We’re now down to 5.3 million fewer voters, and shrinking. In 2020, 158,429,631 Americans voted. As of this writing 153,103,472 Americans have voted. We will probably finish this cycle with a couple million fewer votes than 2020, and the pandemic year was a wild one — lockdowns and social distancing and masking requirements, massive unemployment, George Floyd, a late Supreme Court vacancy — and the intense and turbulent times likely spurred higher turnout than usual.