The key voter shifts that led to Trump’s battleground state sweep
For President-elect Donald Trump, there’s a clear story that runs through each of the seven battleground states that he swept on his way to recapturing the White House.
He managed to drive up even further what were already sky-high margins with his white, blue-collar base while harnessing historically broad nonwhite voter support to erode the Democratic base in cities and diversifying suburbs.
And for Vice President Kamala Harris, the battleground picture is one of regression — a widespread failure to match Joe Biden’s 2020 performance, with her gains largely isolated to areas centered on the wealthier, college-educated white voters who increasingly make up her party’s backbone.
With the final votes now largely tallied, we dug into the county-level, demographic and exit poll data to identify the key voter trends in the states that decided the 2024 presidential election.
Arizona
Result: Trump 52.2%; Harris 46.7%
Margin: Trump +186,138
Two counties in Arizona make up the lion’s share of the population.
The biggest by far is Maricopa County, which is basically Phoenix and its sprawling metro area. More than six out of every 10 votes in the state come from here. Its Republican lean has been the foundation of the party’s steady statewide success for decades. But when Biden won Arizona by a razor-thin 10,457 votes four years ago, he became the first Democrat since Harry Truman in 1948 to win Maricopa.
That breakthrough now looks more like a one-off, with Trump reclaiming the county by more than 70,000 votes this time around.
New Hispanic support played a central role. After losing Arizona’s Latino vote by 24 points to Biden, Trump slashed his deficit to just 10 points this time. That was enough to swing Maricopa, where a third of the population is Hispanic.
It also boosted Trump south of Phoenix in Pima County, home to about 15% of the state’s voters. Anchored by the college town of Tucson, Pima is a blue county, but Trump managed to reduce Democrats’ advantage from 18 points down to 15 — yielding a net shift of about 20,000 votes.
There was another, albeit smaller, factor in Trump’s Arizona victory: New support from Native Americans. They make up only about 5% of Arizona’s population, but there are two counties in the northeast corner of the state that are nearly half Native American.
Navajo County includes the Hopi Reservation, with the Navajo Nation encompassing much of the rest of the county, as well as next-door Apache County. Apache is also home to the Fort Apache Reservation. They have a combined population of about 175,000 (by comparison, Maricopa’s is 4.4 million), but the results in each are telling.
In Apache, what had been a 34-point margin for Biden plummeted to 19 points for Harris. And in Navajo, Trump more than doubled his 8-point victory from four years ago, besting Harris by 17 points.
Georgia
Result: Trump 50.7%; Harris 48.5%
Vote margin: Trump +115,100
The key to Biden’s narrow Georgia victory in 2020 was a group of nine population-dense metro Atlanta counties, where he drove up even further what had already been overwhelming Democratic margins.
This “blue blob” makes up more than 40% of all votes statewide. It’s anchored by Atlanta, a near-majority Black city that’s long been a Democratic bastion, and its suburbs are marked by some of the most dramatic population growth and demographic turnover in the nation.
Back in 2012, then-President Barack Obama carried the blob counties by 18 points, and by 2020, the margin had exploded to 37 points for Biden. To win Georgia this time around, Harris needed this momentum to continue.
Instead, it stalled. Overall, she won these nine counties by 35 points, garnering about 5,000 fewer net votes than Biden. This is the first time in 20 years that the blob trended away from the Democrats in a presidential election.
There’s a twist, though. In some of these counties, Harris actually did improve on Biden’s performance, significantly.
Harris’ gains in Douglas, Henry, Newton and Rockdale are about the only bright spots for her in Georgia. In fact, they are among the only counties in the country that actually got bluer between 2020 and 2024.
Demographics help explain this: The surge in growth in each of these counties comes heavily from Black residents who moved from out of state and brought strong Democratic allegiances with them. Unlike other nonwhite groups, the shift of Black voters away from Democrats this election was very slight, allowing these counties to defy the national trend.
The problem for Harris is that these gains were more than offset by her regression in the higher-population blob counties of Fulton, Gwinnett and DeKalb, where there are concentrations of nonwhite demographic groups that moved significantly toward Trump. In Gwinnett, for example, nearly one-third of its 1 million residents are either Hispanic or Asian American.
And Harris’ overall decline in the biggest metro Atlanta counties left her vulnerable to Trump’s slightly improved performance in the GOP-friendly exurbs (most notably, high-population Cherokee and Forsyth counties) and across wide swaths of small-town and rural Georgia.
Overall, Trump improved on his 2020 showing in 153 of Georgia’s 159 counties.
Michigan
Result: Trump 49.6%; Harris 48.2%
Margin: Trump +80,324
On paper, Michigan appeared to be a heavy lift for Trump as the battleground state he lost by the widest margin in 2020 — 154,188 votes, or about 3 percentage points.
So, what happened this time? Well, let’s start with another question: Is there anywhere in the state where Harris was able to improve on Biden’s performance? The answer is yes, in three counties in the northern Lower Peninsula.
Hours away from the population center of southeast Michigan, these four picturesque counties along the “Midwest Coast” have become magnets for higher-income retirees, second-home owners and summer resortgoers. Leelanau, where you’ll find a flourishing wine industry (yes, Michigan has one), and Grand Traverse, where charming Traverse City sits on a bay that leads out to Lake Michigan, have among the highest median incomes in the state.
Demographically, it’s an area that’s only getting friendlier to Democrats. But that was it for her. In the state’s other 80 counties, she lost ground compared to Biden, and Democrats’ 154,000-vote advantage from 2020 evaporated quickly.
The damage for Harris was particularly dire in Wayne, the state’s largest county. Four years ago, Biden carried it 68%-30%, a margin of 332,617 votes. Harris, though, only won Wayne by 29 points, a margin of 247,803 votes. That’s a net reduction of about 85,000 votes for Democrats from their biggest single source of votes on the map.
Harris underperformed in heavily Black Detroit, Wayne’s principal city, where turnout was down by about 10,000 votes compared to four years ago. But the bulk of Wayne’s population is outside of Detroit’s borders, where Harris’ troubles extended.
Dearborn and Dearborn Heights have among the highest concentrations of Arab Americans anywhere in the country (Dearborn, in fact, is America’s only Arab-majority city). Biden carried both by landslide margins in 2020, but Harris suffered massive defections (presumably due to the Israel-Hamas war) and outright lost each city to Trump. Democratic support similarly collapsed in the Muslim-majority city of Hamtramck. And Harris lost significant ground in Canton, with a sizable Asian American population, and Melvindale, where 1 in 4 residents are Hispanic.
Just north of Detroit, Harris also suffered losses in massive Oakland County, where four-year college degrees are abundant and incomes are far above the state average. But Oakland’s Hispanic and Asian American populations are also growing, and what had been a 108,000-vote Biden margin fell to just 82,000 for Harris. Meanwhile, next door in Macomb County, with its blue-collar cities and suburbs, Trump expanded his winning margin by 30,000 votes compared to 2020.
This was the story of Michigan, where increased blue-collar strength and new nonwhite voter support added hundreds of thousands of votes to Trump’s column. With her gains limited to wine country and resort towns, Harris simply couldn’t keep pace.
Nevada
Result: Trump 50.6%; Harris 47.5%
Margin: Trump +46,193
The political geography of Nevada isn’t complicated. About 70% of all the vote comes from Clark County, which takes in Las Vegas and its ever-expanding suburbs and planned communities. After decades of toss-up status, the county flipped to the Democrats in 1992 and hasn’t looked back, with its racial diversity (about 90% of Nevada’s Black residents live here), service worker economy and strong union presence powering the party’s candidates.
But Trump’s breakthrough performance with two nonwhite demographic groups produced a decisive shift in Clark — not enough to put it back in the Republican column, but closer than any GOP presidential candidate has come since 1988. One-third of Clark’s population is Hispanic and another 10% is Asian American.
The statewide exit poll — which overwhelmingly comprises Clark residents — recorded just how much ground Trump gained with these voters. Trump and Harris tied among Nevada’s Hispanic voters after Biden won them by 26 points in 2020. And Trump carried Asian American voters in the state by 3 points after losing them by 29 points four years ago.
After losing Clark by 9.4 points to Biden four years ago, Trump fell only 2.6 points short this time around. This amounted to a net improvement of about 64,000 votes in the county — or twice the margin of Trump’s statewide defeat in 2020.
About 450 miles northwest of Vegas, in the state’s other major population center, in and around Reno in Washoe County, Trump also made strides. Washoe is a quarter Hispanic and has a much smaller Asian American population than Clark, but the demographics were friendly enough that Trump only lost it by a point. That’s better than his 4.5-point loss four years ago.
The rest of Nevada tends to be heavily rural, white and blue collar. In these places, Trump built slightly on what were already landslide margins.
That all led to Trump becoming the first Republican presidential candidate since 2004 to carry Nevada — and the first from either party to win the state while still losing both Clark and Washoe counties.
North Carolina
Result: Trump 51.0%; Harris 47.8%
Vote margin: Trump +183,527
Similar to Georgia, Democrats failed to expand their support in the major population centers that have become the backbone of their coalition.
In North Carolina, there are several Democratic-friendly hubs across the state, with larger concentrations than the statewide average of either Black residents (21%) or white adults with four-year degrees (25%), or both.
Cumulatively, these eight counties make up just under 40% of the statewide vote, and as with the “blob” in Georgia, they inched away from Democrats, with Harris netting around 25,000 fewer votes from them than Biden did.
Meanwhile, Trump saw his margins tick slightly upward across most of small-town and rural North Carolina. He made particularly notable gains in rural counties with significant Black populations (10 points or higher than the statewide average of 21%), improving his margins there by about 25,000 votes compared to 2020. And in four counties with a large Native American population — the Lumbee Tribe in Robeson, Hoke and Scotland counties; and the Eastern Cherokee in Swain County — his margins increased by roughly 6,000 votes.
Harris showed measurable improvement over Biden around Asheville in the mountains of western North Carolina, netting nearly 10,000 additional votes in Buncombe County and several surrounding counties. But she only built on Biden’s performance in a few other counties. Given that she started out in a 75,000-vote hole (Trump’s winning margin in 2020), it wasn’t nearly enough.
Pennsylvania
Result: Trump 50.4%; Harris 48.6%
Vote margin: Trump +125,325
Overall, Pennsylvania shifted 3 points to Trump between 2020 and 2024. But the movement was most pronounced in the eastern part of the state, where Trump posted seven of his 10 biggest county-level improvements compared to four years ago.
Key to this: Deep inroads with Latino voters that helped Trump erode the massive advantage that Democrats depend on in cities throughout the region.
In Philadelphia itself, Harris won by 59 points, 79%-20%. But that was down from Biden’s 81%-18% win four years ago, amounting to a net reduction in the Democratic margin of around 50,000 votes. That drop-off alone effectively erased more than half of Biden’s 81,000-vote statewide margin. Sixteen percent of Philadelphia residents are Latino, and a review of precinct-level results from NBC News’ Decision Desk found that Trump’s gains in the city were heavily concentrated in majority-Latino neighborhoods.
In smaller, Latino-heavy cities in eastern Pennsylvania, Trump made big strides, including double-digit improvements in the state’s three Hispanic-majority cities.
Puerto Ricans are the main Hispanic subgroup in Allentown and Reading, while Dominicans are heavily concentrated in Hazleton, a city that was less than 5% Hispanic just 25 years ago.
Also crucial for Trump: He clawed back support from white blue-collar voters who rallied to him in 2016 but defected to Biden in 2020. This was most notable in Lackawanna County, which is 82% white and home to Biden’s native Scranton. After Obama carried it by 28 points in 2012, Hillary Clinton won it by just 3 points in 2016. Biden managed to increase Democrats’ margins there by 9 points in 2020, but Harris carried it by 3 points this year.
Trump also flipped Bucks County, which has a larger share of white voters without college degrees than the other three Philadelphia collar counties. And he drove up what were already robust margins in Pike County, where growth has been fueled by in-migration from New Jersey and New York residents.
Democrats, meanwhile, were banking on even deeper support in the giant, higher-end Philadelphia suburbs. While Chester and Montgomery counties each went for Harris by double digits, her margin fell several points short of Biden’s in both. Her campaign had also identified emerging suburbs in the south-central part of the state, near Harrisburg, as growth targets. Instead, Harris merely treaded water in them.
Wisconsin
Result: Trump 49.6%; Harris 48.8%
Margin: Trump +29,687
The vote shifts in Wisconsin were momentous, but compared to the rest of the battlegrounds, they were also small, with Trump turning what was a 20,682-vote loss in 2020 into a 29,687-vote victory in 2024. In both races, less than 1 percentage point separated the two candidates.
Trump managed to turn the tables with marginal gains across rural Wisconsin, newfound strength in the state’s (relatively few) Latino-heavy pockets, and by slowing defections from Milwaukee’s big Republican suburbs.
Harris, meanwhile, was done in by her party’s increasing reliance on a narrow geographic base that just didn’t pack the punch her campaign was depending on.
Perhaps nowhere in the country has the march of rural blue-collar voters from the Democratic Party to the Trump-led GOP been more dramatic than in Wisconsin. Nearly half of the state’s counties — 32 of 72 — can be labeled “Trump surge” counties. These tend to be rural and have smaller populations, with very high concentrations of white adults without four-year college degrees.
When Obama was re-elected in 2012, he carried 15 of these counties, some by blowout margins. But they all shifted at least 20 points toward the GOP from 2012 to 2020. And this year, Trump made further gains in every one of them, winning all but one. Cumulatively, this added up to a net shift of about 20,000 votes in Trump’s direction — nearly half of what he gained statewide.
Wisconsin has a small Hispanic population overall. But Trump still registered a net gain of more than 17,000 votes from five areas in the state with a significant Hispanic population.
Key to the Harris strategy in Wisconsin were the three population-rich suburban Milwaukee counties. While they’ve remained solidly Republican in the Trump era, the party’s margins declined in 2016 and 2020. But the further erosion Democrats needed didn’t materialize to the degree they hoped it would.
These small shifts in the “WOW” counties added up to a net improvement of just 2,705 votes for Harris. And that was entirely offset by small Trump gains in the large, blue-collar “BOW” counties (Brown, Outagamie and Winnebago) near Green Bay and Appleton.
After that, all that was left for Harris was Dane County, which now rivals Milwaukee as her party’s biggest vote hub in the state. Home to Madison and its well-to-do suburbs, Democrats had managed to attain increased pluralities here in every election this century, with Biden carrying it by 181,000 votes over Trump (or 76%-23%).
Harris did manage to squeeze even more out of Dane, winning it by 188,000, but it would have taken a lot more than that to undo the damage she endured throughout the rest of the state.