The recent NYT The Daily podcast episode “A 1,400-County Crisis for Democrats,” examined the county-by-county shift over the past four presidential election cycles. Reporter Shane Goldmacher did a thorough analysis, starting with 2012 (the last election without Donald Trump on the ballot) as a baseline and found a shocking development:
Shane Goldmaker: So more than 1,400 counties in the country have trended continuously in the Republican direction since Trump has been on the ballot.
Michael Barbaro: So about half of all of the nation’s counties.
Shane Goldmaker: Nearly half of the counties in the entire country have trended Republican. And less than 2 percent of the nation’s counties have trended Democratic. Only 57 of the counties in the entire country have moved continuously to the left.
Michael Barbaro: Wow, hugely disproportionate.
Shane Goldmaker: Hugely disproportionate. And look, the total number of people living in these Republican-moving counties way outnumber the number of people living in these continuously Democratic-moving counties. It’s something around 42 million to 8 million people.
Michael Barbaro: Basically, that data suggests that Republicans are improving their relationship to more and more voters in more and more places, while Democrats are not.shane goldmacher
And I think that while that top line number is scary enough for the Democratic Party, it’s actually the complexion of those counties that is most concerning.
Michael Barbaro: Well, talk about that complexion for both kinds of counties, those moving further and further toward the Republican side and the pretty small number that are moving farther and farther toward the Democratic side.shane goldmacher
Shane Goldmaker: Well, let’s start with the Democrats because they’re improving in so many fewer places. They’re basically only doing better in the richest corners of the country and the most educated corners of the country. And on the flip side, Trump is doing better in working class parts of the country everywhere. So, yes, we know that Donald Trump has done well in white, rural parts of America. He’s doing even better now than he did when he first came onto the political scene.
That’s part of it. The other part is he is doing better in working class parts of the country that are diverse — inner cities, Black neighborhoods, Latino neighborhoods, big, big cities, smaller towns in the South. All across the country, diverse places, Donald Trump has been doing better, not once, not twice, three times in a row. In 2016, he improved for the party. In 2020, he improved for the party. And then again in 2024.
What these maps showed is that his victory was the culmination of a set of improvements that Trump has been making among working class voters and diverse voters for a decade.
There’s a whole lot more, including considerable analysis as to why this has happened, but the bottom line is that the results don’t seem to be a function of single economic events or the comparative personalities and campaign strategies of the candidates in the four contests. Indeed, even though Trump lost in 2020, he actually gained voters over 2016 at the county level.
Strangely, NBC (“Breaking down 20 years of election data that shows how the two parties have evolved in the Trump era“) has done a similar analysis, going back even further. It’s top-line findings are more conventional:
President Donald Trump’s second election win was different from his first in one big, important way: He won the popular vote, just the second time in the last two decades that Republicans had done so.
And in the time between those two victories, from 2004 to 2024, there have been dramatic shifts in the nation’s politics along geographic, racial, educational and economic lines. Trump is operating in a very different Republican Party than George W. Bush was 20 years earlier. A look at where the vote has shifted most in that time tells an eye-catching story.
Over the last 20 years, the counties where Republicans have improved their presidential vote share by the largest margins are predominately centered in Appalachia and the surrounding areas. The 100 counties that saw the largest shifts include: 11 of West Virginia’s 55 counties, 27 of Tennessee’s 95 counties, 18 of Arkansas’ 75 counties and 17 of Kentucky’s 120 counties.
These counties, on the whole, are much more heavily white than average, according to census data, with white residents making up at least 90% of the total population in about two-thirds of these counties. All but 12 of those counties are at least 75% white. The unemployment rate across these counties is about twice the national average. Residents are more likely to be reliant on food stamps and less likely to have moved in the last year. Residents of these counties, on average, also are significantly less likely to have a bachelor’s degree or higher.
While the national average in the American Community Survey’s most recent five-year estimate is that 35% of Americans have a bachelor’s degree or higher, the average in these counties is just 14%.
In short, the shifts show how Trump has brought more white working-class voters into the GOP, causing spectacular changes in some localities.
But, reading a little further, we get this:
A different look — at the counties with the largest pro-Republican shifts between Trump’s three elections, from 2016 to 2024 — shows some major differences in the types of places that have moved to the right specifically within the Trump era.
On average, the 100 counties that shifted most toward Republicans in the Trump era are significantly more Hispanic than the national average. These counties are also wealthier and more educated compared to the counties that moved most from 2004 to 2024, although they are still below the national average.
While the biggest Republican-shifting counties from 2004 to 2024 are largely concentrated around Appalachia, the counties that shifted the most to the right in the Trump era are more spread out and predominantly in the South and West.
Twenty-nine Texas counties show up in the list of 100 counties that saw the greatest gain in GOP presidential vote margin between 2016 and 2024, and 12 of those are among the 20 that saw the biggest shifts. All of these Texas counties are majority-Hispanic, and some are more than 90% Hispanic, emblematic of Trump’s dramatic improvement among Hispanic voters in 2024 as well as his success in heavily Hispanic areas along the border in 2020.
Another heavily Hispanic county, Miami-Dade County, saw the 15th-largest shift in margin toward Republicans between 2016 and 2024 out of more than 3,000 counties nationwide. Other major population centers in New York City — including the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens — are in the top 100 too. And the 14 counties in Utah are typical of another trend: Many Republicans initially skeptical of Trump in 2016 (including Mormons, who make up a significant part of the electorate in Utah) largely fell in line eight years later.
There’s definitely a resorting happening. What’s hard to know, since Trump has been headlining the Republican ballot for the last three cycles, is how much of this is him and how much is the GOP. The party nominated George W. Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney during the first half of the period in question and Trump the last half. There’s a chasm between those candidates.
I continue to see the rise of the Tea Party in the wake of the Great Recession as the turning point. Starting with the 2010 midterm cycle, the party started nominating “populist” candidates with much rougher edges downballot. There was a rising sense that the Republican elites had failed to live up to their rhetoric, and thus a rejection of the old line.
McCain, of course, chose Sarah Palin as his running mate and flirted with Joe The Plumber, but it was clearly pandering. Romney was the only conventional Republican among those with a realistic shot at the nomination (Jon Huntsman, my personal favorite, seemed to be actively try to alienate the base) and managed to win it. In hindsight, it was the last gasp of the old guard.
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Author: James Joyner
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