300,000 Ohioans who voted in 2020 didn’t in 2024. Why?
By Aaron Cousin/Kent State NewsLab
About 5.7 million Ohioans voted in 2024, compared to about 6 million in 2020 — a loss of about 300,000 voters.
Those losses were concentrated among Democrats. Donald Trump received roughly 3.1 million votes in both 2024 and 2020. Kamala Harris in 2024 received around 2.5 million votes; in 2020, Joe Biden won nearly 2.7 million.
Katherine Jellison, a professor of history at Ohio University, said fewer Ohioans voted this time around because many may not have thought anything would change.
“People [were] not being sold on either major party candidate, and [were] just thinking it wouldn’t make a difference because they didn’t see either one of them really speaking to them” Jettison explained. “I think that’s the main reason.”
In 2016, Hillary Clinton received fewer total votes than Harris in Ohio. But Clinton still out-performed Harris in the most populous Democratic-leaning counties in Ohio, like Cuyahoga and Franklin Counties. In Cuyahoga County, for example, Harris received about 375,000 votes in 2024, compared to Clinton’s nearly 400,000 votes in 2016 and Biden’s 415,000 votes there in 2020.
Jellison said the name recognition of Clinton and Biden – who’ve been popular in United States politics for decades – helped their campaigns, whereas people were less familiar with Harris. She also said race and gender likely played a part in why Harris didn’t get the votes her team hoped for.
“The intersection of race and gender probably made some people uncomfortable in voting,” Jellison said. “I hate to say it … but that probably played a factor.”
Additionally, Harris only campaigned for 107 days after Joe Biden dropped out of the race – the shortest campaign in U.S. history. Harris’ position as the vice president under Biden likely didn’t help her either, as a recent 2024 Reuters poll showed Biden’s approval rating is only 37%.
Some people didn’t vote because it was hard for them to vote in general. Cuyahoga County resident Ciera Ingram didn’t vote in the election because she felt voting by mail-in ballot was difficult.
“I looked into it and the process seemed complicated to me for some reason, so we thought it would be easier to do it in person,” Ingram said. But she said she and her husband waited until the last minute and ultimately did not vote.
The voting process itself is something that’s enough to turn away all types of voters regardless of party. Mark Cassell, a professor of political science at Kent State University, said sometimes people don’t vote in urban areas because of how challenging it can be.
“It’s frankly just harder to vote in those places,” Cassell said. “You typically have longer lines.”
Cassell also said it’s hard to vote sometimes because people and polling places both move. “Those are going to be places where you’re going to see lower turnout, partly because it’s just harder to connect to those people.”
Ingram now regrets not going out to the polls to vote.
“I definitely would have voted for Kamala, and I was very sad that she didn’t win,” Ingram said. “I felt even more bad that I didn’t vote.”
This story was originally published by the Kent State NewsLab, a collaborative news outlet publishing journalism by Kent State students.