Just what does the actual vote total for Trump last week mean?

Ari Melber on NBC brings some post-election thoughts, including on how Trumpism is bigger than the Mango Mussolini who was the LOSER Presidential candidate this year, Trump's A Loser: What Does His 2020 Loss Mean For America? 11/09/2020:

Speaking of LOSERS, this theme song fits Trump more than ever:

Melber says (after 3;30):

... over the past four years, we did hear people - sometimes these comfortable D.C. people - blithely claim, "This is not who we are." But, America: Trumpism is who we are in some signficant ways. This [Trump] is who so many Americans support. And after four years of seeing Trump in action, removing any possible doubt people might have had, Trump went from roughtly 63 million votes last time to 71 million votes this time!

Which is a good time to mention again that we all need to be a little careful with early reports of voting based on exit polls. Not least because of this fact, which may the most important result of last Tuesday's election: "In the midst of a pandemic, an estimated 160 million Americans, or 67 percent of eligible voters, participated. Turnout was the highest of any American election in 120 years. [my emphasis]" (Lawrence Norden and Derek Tisler, The U.S. Election System Worked Foreign Affairs 11/05/2020)

That's 67% of eligible voters, not just registered voters. It will probably take some time yet for demographers and political scientists to tease out the lessons from the unusually larger turnout. For instance, yes, Trump got more votes this time than in 2016, and Biden got even more votes than Hillary Clinton in 2020. In other words, even more people voted against Trump in 2020 compared to 2016.

This has attracted quite a bit of attention (from Sean Collins, Trump made gains with Black voters in some states. Here’s why. Vox 11/04/2020):

According to AP VoteCast, Trump won 8 percent of the Black vote, about a 2 percentage-point gain on his 2016 numbers (using the 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, or CCES, a national survey of more than 50,000 confirmed voters, as a point of comparison).

And he may have done even better than 2 percentage points. If you compare the CCES numbers to the results of 2020 exit polls by Edison Research, Trump actually improved by 4 percentage points.

Here it's important to keep some basic mathematics in mind. A comparison of the effect of the lower number of voters with the higher one.

100 people (2016 percentages) 6% = 6 people for Trump, 94 people for Clinton and other)
100 people (2020 percentages) 8% = 8 people for Trump, 92 people for Biden and other)

1000 people (2016 percentages) 6% = 60 people for Trump, 940 people for Clinton and other)
1000 people (2020 percentages) 8% = 80 people for Trump, 920 people for Biden and other)

If the turnout in 2016 is 100, Trump gets 6 votes (6%). If turnout is 1000 in 2020, Trump gets 72 more votes (8%) than in 2016.

If the turnout in 2016 is 100, non-Trump gets 94 votes (94%). If turnout is 1000 in 2020, non-Trump gets 826 more votes (92%). In other words, non-Trump gains 754 more votes than Trump gains. In other words, the lower percentage in that voter demographic in 2020 gives more of an advantage in actual numbers of votes to the non-Trump side.

So the percentage change is something to analyze and to be concerned about. But gaining more votes is more important than the percentage in terms of winning elections. So the non-Trump side in this scenario benefits from the higher turnout despite the lower percentage. A significant change in the turnout can muddy the picture in looking at changes in voting behavior among particular demographic segments of the electorate.