[Terr_]

> more votes than anyone had ever received prior to that.

That fact falls into a whole class of "new records" which sound impressive but are usually meaningless, because it's closer to the default outcome.

In this case, the voting-age population was (yet again) going to increase, so each "new record" in votes cast becomes boringly-normal rather than unusually interesting. The same also happens with certain dollar-amount records, which are not adjusted for inflation or overall economy growth.

A similar phenomenon to https://xkcd.com/1138/ , except it has to do with trends over time rather than geographically.

[bandyaboot]

While it’s true that setting a new record isn’t unusual, in the case of 2020, the turnout was actually very high even taking into account population growth.