Trump improved his 2020 score in 90% of counties [Carte exclusive]

Date November 13, 2024 Add Article added Download PDF Share

Donald Trump is the first Republican candidate close to winning the popular vote since 2004. Republicans regained control of the Senate from Democrats with a comfortable 3-seat majority, while the GOP is poised to maintain its majority in the House of Representatives by a narrow margin.

Trump’s victory in the electoral college was not, however, a “tidal wave”.

• Trump won 312 electoral votes, compared to 226 for Harris. The difference, however, comes down to less than 250,000 votes distributed in only 3 states of the ” blue wall » — Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania — or 0.18% of the total votes cast.
• By analyzing the results of the presidential election within the states themselves, the data indicates, however, that Trump made progress everywhere, or almost. Of the 3,114 counties and equivalents for which we have final results, Trump improved his margin in 2,794 counties compared to 2020.
• Kamala Harris, for her part, improved the score achieved by Joe Biden four years ago in only 320 counties, or 10% of the total in the United States – compared to 90% for Trump.

Of the 10 counties in which Trump performed best compared to 2020 (by a margin equal to or greater than 20 points higher), 6 are in Texas, the state sharing the longest border with Mexico: Maverick, Webb , Dimmit, Starr, El Paso and Hidalgo. While Harris won the majority of votes in two of those counties (Dimmit and El Paso), Trump flipped Starr County — which has the highest share of Hispanic Americans in the country, 97% — for the first time times since 1892.

• The dynamic in favor of Trump is twofold: in the states which had overwhelmingly voted for him in 2020, the Republican candidate improved his results more.
• In Kentucky, which Trump won by a margin of 26 points four years ago, he improved his score in each of the state’s 120 counties.
• The Republican also improved his results in all counties in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Rhode Island and Vermont, five solidly Democratic states that were all won by Kamala Harris in the election.
• It is in the West of the country (Utah, Colorado, Washington State and Wyoming) that Harris managed to improve Biden’s score in the greatest number of counties proportional to those in the state.

The Democratic candidate also performed better than Biden in the suburbs of major cities in the swing-states of the East (around Atlanta in Georgia, Raleigh in North Carolina, Milwaukee in Wisconsin), but not in the two pivotal states of the sun belt : Arizona and Nevada. In 2020, Biden became the first Democratic candidate to win Maricopa County, around Phoenix, since 1948. This year, Trump won it again (as in 2016) by a 4-point margin.