From New York to the Rio Grande Valley, in big cities like Miami and San Francisco, to college towns and subdivided exurbs, American voters shifted markedly to the right this year.
If you zoom in on a place like Robeson County, North Carolina, you can see it, which is a majority-minority county with the largest Native American population in the state, leaning 9 points toward Donald Trump. If you zoom out you can see it, just four years after a 16-point defeat by President Joe Biden, the reliably blue state of New Jersey supported Kamala Harris by just 5 points.
This trend cut across demographic groups, with the heavily Arab American city of Dearborn, Michigan giving a plurality of its votes to Republicans. According to a CNN exit poll, Latino men supported Trump by a 12-point margin — a result that would have been unimaginable to strategists of both parties as recently as 2012, when the GOP lost the presidency and the contest had its own carcass. The poll said non-white voters “think Republicans don’t like them.”
The right’s strength was evident up and down the ballot during the voting, with Republicans taking control of the Senate and appearing to be on the verge of holding a narrow majority in the House. While the extent of the carnage is still being assessed, Democrats have lost their majorities in the lower houses of the Michigan and Minnesota legislatures.
And this change was so sweeping that it left no ray of hope for the Democrats. After claiming the popular vote in every election since 2008 — and lamenting the Electoral College as a grotesque hindrance in that era of certain political dominance — the party looks set to lose this one, too.
This came despite Democrats outvoting Republicans and knocking on millions of doors, and after Harris’ star-studded endorsement and careful ground game, which ultimately fell short as Trump closed the deal with Joe Rogan and Elon Musk. Ultimately, Harris’s truncated 107-day campaign following Biden’s sudden exit could not address voters’ concerns over the direction of the country, particularly the economy and the state of immigration.
Democratic pollster Evan Roth Smith said, “The Democratic Party simply has to accept the fact that we were rejected en masse on a national level by American voters.”
border county
One place that helps illuminate Trump’s decisive victory is Maverick County, Texas. Its swing was larger than any other county in the country: Trump won it with 59% of the vote – a 28-point swing from four years earlier.
The last Republican to win Maverick County was Herbert Hoover in 1928.
Maverick, where about 90% of the population speaks Spanish at home, has a large number of Latino voters. Trump overwhelmingly won Latino men across the country, and while Latino women still favored Harris, Republicans took advantage of their party with them.
The map gives clues about the issues that prompted the change. Eight of the 10 US counties leaning most to the right were in Texas – all along the Rio Grande River that separates the US from Mexico. Maverick is home to Eagle Pass, a hotspot for border crossings that Trump promised to close.
Both campaigns emphasized ads targeted at Latino voters, with the percentage of presidential election ads running on Spanish-language television and radio stations reaching record levels this year.
“These people have always been conservative, they’ve never had anyone knock on their door and say it’s OK to vote this way,” said Abraham Enriquez, founder of Bienvenido US, a Republican advocacy group targeting Latino voters in Arizona, Nevada. . Pennsylvania, Georgia and Texas during the election.
Betty Silva, a New York voter and daughter of Puerto Rican parents, is one such voter who put aside her personal dislike for Trump and voted for him. When the Republican was president, she said, “I can buy stuff.”
Trump’s victory this time has shown Republicans that a winning coalition can be built around populist appeals to multi-ethnic, working-class voting blocks — and his 2016 victory was no fluke.
Still, it remains to be seen how enduring Trump’s MAGA movement will be in 2028, when he will be constitutionally barred from seeking a third term. After all, voters already rejected him in 2020 as the pandemic upended the economy.
harris fall
The story of the 2024 election is as much about the fall of Harris as it is about the rise of Trump. Arizona and Nevada have still to be called, but due to the swing toward Republicans, Trump could get more than 312 electoral votes if he wins all seven battleground states. This is more than the winner received in the previous two elections, but quite low by historical standards: Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama all received more.
In most states with complete results, Trump improved his 2020 vote totals by roughly equal proportions in battleground and non-battleground states.
But Harris cannot say that. As of Friday morning, she was 84,227 votes behind Biden’s pace in five battleground states — but 2.7 million votes behind in 29 other states with more than 98% of the expected votes counted. As Monmouth University pollster Patrick Murray noted, their vote totals suffered the most in states where Democrats typically win – a sign of waning enthusiasm from their base.
Arizona voter Jennifer Linzi could not support Harris because of the vice president’s stance on the Israel-Hamas war. Linzi, a 39-year-old progressive, left a Phoenix polling station on Tuesday saying she had only voted in down-ballot races. “This is the first time I have not participated in a presidential election in my entire adult life,” he said.
Maricopa County, where Phoenix is located, is on track for a 20% increase in these presidential “undervotes” this year compared to last time.
Election officials sort ballots ready for tabulation at the Maricopa County Tabulation and Election Center (MCTEC) in Phoenix. Photographer: Dominic Valente/Bloomberg
Of the US counties with more than 98% of expected vote counts as of 12:00 am Friday, Trump had improved his vote share in 2,380 of them. In only 231 of those cases did Harris improve on Biden’s 2020 mark. Many of them were Georgia and North Carolina counties, which were hardest hit by September’s Hurricane Helene, causing turnout to decline.
In Pennsylvania’s Monroe County, in the heart of the Pocono Mountains, immigrants from New York City have turned local politics blue for the past two decades. But after a 7-point shift to the right, Trump is winning the county by 900 votes.
Trump’s performance, with Republicans on track to take control of the Senate and retain the House, will give him a stronger hand in negotiating with Congress on taxes, spending, immigration and trade. He has shown a willingness to use his support to enforce party discipline, giving him considerable influence over the leadership in Congress.
And he has already appointed three justices to the Supreme Court in his first term – creating a six-to-three conservative majority – and with three justices in their 70s, he may have a chance to nominate even more.
“The voters of the United States have said decisively that we are not happy with what we’ve got under the Biden presidency, and we’re ready to go in a different direction,” said Jay Townsend, a bipartisan political consultant.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
