Trump Didn’t “Steal” The 2024 Election
Donald Trump shaking hands with President Elon Musk. Image taken from Yahoo News.
Before I get into the meat of this article, I want to clarify one thing: I am a leftist. The right wing falls victim to disinformation and “fake news” far more frequently than the left does, and when they do, they deserve to be called out on it. But I also think we should be honest with ourselves and call out falsehoods when we see them.
First of all, let’s talk about the 2024 election. At a time when so many Americans want to move on from the election and are sick of politics, I’m going to relitigate that election again. Feel free to click out of this article if you don’t want to hear about it.
A number of people have said that the 2024 election was stolen from Kamala Harris. Sometimes they cite Donald Trump’s January 2025 statement that Elon Musk “knows those voting machines.” Other times they say something far more easily refuted, which is that the election was stolen because “Harris had much larger crowd sizes.”
I readily concede that the metric of the “enthusiasm gap” is largely obsolete, to the extent that it ever really mattered to begin with. The idea that whoever’s voters are more excited to vote for their candidate could only swing an election decided by the tiniest of margins these days. Given how polarized the American electorate has become, of course, presidential elections are frequently decided by a football stadium’s worth of people - that’s no secret.
But the 2024 election was not. It was a veritable landslide by American standards. Democrats don’t want to admit it, but it’s true. A Republican winning the popular vote had not happened since 2004, which is basically a lifetime ago in today’s environment.
In terms of the “enthusiasm gap,” it needs to be said that every vote counts the same, no matter how the voter feels about it. Whether you volunteered twelve hours a day for your chosen candidate, or whether you walked into the polling place completely and totally inebriated, the voting machine doesn’t care. All that matters is what bubble you filled in on that ballot.
Where this metric can make a difference is when someone decides whether to turn out or not. Indeed, prior to the election many people speculated on whether the pro-Palestine protestors would stay home and cost Kamala Harris the presidency. Spoiler alert: They did. And they doomed all of us to live in this fucked-up nation.
People might also point to the gap between the campaigns in terms of their ground game. After all, during the 2024 election, Joe Biden and later Kamala Harris employed a veritable army of canvassers in every swing state and plenty of other states as well. Donald Trump, meanwhile, did not. He outsourced every aspect of his ground game to inexperienced outsiders.
Indeed, in the last three presidential elections, the candidate with the better ground game has ended up losing. In 2016, Trump’s campaign was basically run on a shoestring out of some dude’s basement, and he still defeated Hillary Clinton where it mattered. In 2020, the Democrats unilaterally disarmed and ran almost no ground game, whereas the Republicans stayed the course despite the COVID-19 pandemic. While this is commonly cited as a reason why Trump came closer than expected to victory in 2020, he still was not able to defeat Joe Biden that time.
It seems that ground game doesn’t matter as much as it used to. Part of that is because of a shift in culture. I’m 24 years old, on the older side of Generation Z, and I was taught never to answer the door if I didn’t know who was on the other side. If a stranger knocks on your door, that’s seen as rude and creepy, whereas it didn’t used to be. I guess Americans have grown increasingly paranoid in recent years.
It’s the same way with phone calls. Whenever someone calls me on my iPhone, I always check the caller ID first. If I don’t know who it is, I immediately hang up. That’s what most members of my generation, which saw one of the largest swings to Trump in 2024, do.
Another argument that some liberals trot out is that Kamala Harris had massive crowds at her rallies. Many thousands turned out for her Houston rally the week before the election. At the time, many people believed this showed she had a lot of support in Houston, and she might be able to win Texas as a result.
Knowing what we know now, of course, this is a fallacious line of thinking. Houston is a major city - it’s the fourth-largest city proper in the United States, even if it barely feels like a “city” when you’re driving through it. It’s one of the worst-designed cities in the world. But that’s besides the point.
Despite losing Texas statewide by nearly 14 percentage points, Kamala Harris still garnered more than 4.8 million votes there. Of almost five million voters, it’s very easy to get thirty thousand to fill a stadium. But it takes far, far, far more than thirty thousand voters to win Texas. As it turns out, Harris supporters were just a lot more vocal than Trump supporters.
Then again, I’ve never understood the “shy Trump voter.” Imagine being so ashamed to vote for Trump that you’ll lie to a pollster and tell them you aren’t voting for Trump, then not thinking Maybe I shouldn’t vote for Trump. But there are so many people in this country that there are probably some who think that way.
This might be hard to believe, but not everyone is as plugged into politics as I and my three readers are. Lots of people passively vote without realizing what one or both candidates wants to do if elected. Now, I think that’s a bad thing - I wish Americans were better-informed. But that’s the harsh reality.
So here’s what I want you all to take away from my little rant. When people ask me Saclux Gemini, did Donald Trump steal the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election from Kamala Harris?, my answer will depend on what you mean.
If you mean, “Did Elon Musk hack into the voting machines so that people who voted for Harris were counted as voting for Trump?”, then no. At least, probably not. It just seems implausible that Trump, who was out of office at the time of the 2024 election, would have been able to hack into machines that way. Voting machines, as Al Jazeera reported back then, aren’t connected to the Internet. However, if one means “Did Donald Trump and Elon Musk take measures to stack the election unfairly in their favor?”, then my answer is far more nuanced.
It is true that voter suppression exists in the United States. The 2018 gubernatorial election in Georgia was one of the most egregious examples . Brian Kemp, whose image has sadly been rehabilitated in the eyes of many moderates, should never have been allowed to oversee his own election. Now that federal Republicans are trying to pass the SAVE Act and will turn a blind eye at best to efforts at the state level, voter suppression is only likely to get worse.
That’s also to say nothing about the media environment we find ourselves in, which was enabled by Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter. Now that Twitter has become Xitter (pronounced “shitter”), far-right content has been greatly amplified, and that has definitely swayed public opinion. We can have a broader conversation about the GOP-friendly media environment another time, but I see no reason to believe that votes were actually hacked.
Rather, it seems more likely to me that American swing voters were even more gullible than usual. Hey, they’ve made dumb decisions before. Was electing Trump in 2024 really that much of a stretch?
In my mind, the discourse about the 2024 election being stolen distracts from more important things the left should be doing. Honestly, Democrats last year should have remembered this more forcefully:
If he gets more votes, he doesn’t need to steal the election.
