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[He did a little better in the popular vote, increasing his number by 0.4%.

What? Trump gained 12.3 million votes.]

Vote numbers increase naturally as a result of population increase, for the same reason that budget numbers increase. Biden’s vote numbers increased even more than Trump’s by over 15m, because of early voting and vote-by-mail. (There’s also the fact that unlike Hillary, Biden wasn’t the most hated Democratic pol in the country). While Trump was wasting $100m in campaign funds and rally-goer time by holding his rallies, Biden was hiring people to round up paper ballots from people who don’t ordinarily vote.

People have this idea that Trump got the greatest vote % in history because he held these rallies. If rally attendance predicted popular vote %, Trump would have gotten the highest popular vote %’s, not the absolute rock bottom for any winning president where there was no credible 3rd party challenger. Trump’s 2016 EV win involved the lowest (-ve) popular vote margin in a century.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presidential_elections_by_popular_vote_margin

People don’t vote because of campaign speeches. Government workers vote to pad government funding for their departments. Blacks vote to keep racial quotas going. Gays vote so they can get gay quotas set up. And so on and so forth. Union members vote to get the government to force their employers to raise their wages and prevent those employers from firing them if they goof off. That’s why Biden won - he went after all the demographics that normally support him, not all of whom show up on election day.

Trump should have done the same for *his* demographics. Instead, he held these showy, wasteful rallies. It *seemed* to work for him in 2016 because of Jill Stein’s fortuitous help in 2016. (Add her tally to Hillary’s number, and Hillary wins the election).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_presidential_election#Results_by_state

[He did a little better in the popular vote, increasing his number by 0.4%.

What? Trump gained 12.3 million votes. ]

While my recollection is slightly off, Trump got 46.1% of the vote in 2016, and 46.8% of the vote in 2020, both of which were lower than Romney’s 47.2%.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_United_States_presidential_election
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_presidential_election
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidential_election

https://www.fec.gov/resources/cms-content/documents/federalelections2012.pdf#page=11
https://www.fec.gov/resources/cms-content/documents/federalelections2016.pdf#page=10
https://www.fec.gov/resources/cms-content/documents/federalelections2020.pdf#page=10

Trump regularly misleads by claiming to be the most popular president in history by pointing to his higher vote tallies compared to prior GOP candidates. The fact is every presidential election will involve more votes for both winner and loser that are higher than their predecessors because the population has been increasing at a fairly rapid pace for literally centuries, which is how we got from 3m in 1776 to 336m today.