This is On Point. I'm Megna Chakrabardi, and it's Friday, 10 days after Election Day.

And so far, the presidential vote count is like this.

President-elect Donald Trump won the Electoral College 312 to 226. No question there.

But when it comes to the popular vote, there's an interesting story unfolding.

And by the way, as a little sidebar,

there's this general rule in radio journalism that listeners cannot process lots of numbers via your ears. That definitely cues my bombastic side eye at antiquated assumptions about your intelligence.

So let's prove them wrong.

Right. As of today, more than 97% of all votes cast in the U.S. have been counted.

There are still about 5 million remaining to be tabulated.

So as of now, Donald Trump has 50.2% of the 2024 popular vote.

That's 76.06 million votes.

In 2020, he got 74.2 million.

Okay, so from 74.2 million four years ago to 76.06 million this year, meaning this year,

he won only 1.86 million more votes than he got in the last cycle, or just 2% more.

Now, given the way the electoral college works, that was more than

enough to tip the EC balance to him. But I'll leave it up to you to decide whether a 2%

popular vote improvement is actually the sweeping mandate that the president-elect says it is.

Over on the Democratic side, things are even more interesting.

Vice President Kamala Harris has 73.12 million votes this year so far. Now compare that to the 81.28 million votes Joe Biden won in 2020. That's an 8.16 million vote deficit for the Democrats.

Overall, across the popular vote, that's roughly 6 million votes less across all Americans

cast this year than in 2020.

And it's that delta that's worthy of close analysis.

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