Hillary Clinton lost the US election because of a huge drop in enthusiasm among past Democrat supporters, not because of a surge in popular support for Donald Trump.

With more than 99.1 per cent of the vote counted, Mr Trump’s tally of almost 59.7 million votes is actually lower than either of the previous Republican candidates, Mitt Romney and John McCain.

But in the end that didn’t matter, because effectively almost 10 million Americans who voted for Barack Obama in 2008 failed to turn out and vote for Ms Clinton.

It means that, according to the latest figures, turnout is just 51.1 per cent. Though that could rise slightly as the final votes come in, that is currently one of the worst turnouts in modern political history - the fourth-worst since 1932, to be exact.

These charts break down the figures and show just how bad that Democrat turnout was.

The shrinking blue vote

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One of the worst turnouts ever

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Opinion polling prior to the election had made it clear that there was a lack of enthusiasm for Ms Clinton. At one point with less than a week to go until the vote, ABC/WaPo polling suggested only 43 per cent of her supporters would claim to being “very enthusiastic” about her as a candidate.

That compares to 53 per cent of Trump supporters, and though the gap appeared to tighten slightly towards the big day itself, Ms Clinton was only ever behind in terms of enthusiasm in polling since September.

By comparison, 51 per cent of Obama supporters in 2012 said they were “very enthusiastic” about his candidacy - more than said the same about Romney - and in 2008 the figure was 61 per cent (in late September), a huge lead over McCain.

Some Democrat strategists warned of the expected low turnout in recent weeks. Leslie Wimes, the president of the Democratic African-American women's caucus, said on 1 November that the campaign was in "panic mode" and it was "over now as far as the African-American community is concerned".

She suggested Ms Clinton had not done enough to mobilise Democrat support among black Americans. "We love President Obama," Ms Wimes said. "That doesn't transfer to Hillary Clinton by osmosis."

Analysts suggested that Ms Clinton’s huge grassroots Democrat operation, couple with the backing of a still-popular incumbent, would be enough to get over the enthusiasm gap.

But in the end, Ms Clinton won the black vote by only 80 percentage points, compared to Mr Obama's 93 per cent in 2008. She also failed to perform as well as expected among Hispanic voters, and by comparison, convincingly lost the white vote to Mr Trump.