While the votes are still being counted and several battleground states are yet to be called, we can see a handful of trends developing in the 2024 election. Former President Donald Trump has shown yet again that he can turn already ruby-red parts of the country even more Republican. And in the suburbs, where Democrats have made gains throughout the Trump era, those gains seem inconsistent at best this time around.
Meanwhile, though it’s still too early to say for sure, Trump appears to have made big inroads with voters of color, particularly the Latino community.
Exit polls, the main way commentators and journalists try to understand electoral trends happening nationally, are notoriously unreliable, and they take weeks or months to paint a complete picture. But there are some trends that are evident so far.
Trump has been able to maximize his support in rural areas
Everyone expected Trump to dominate the countryside. What was not clear, however, was whether he could improve on the already large margin he won in 2020.
Still it seems he has. By late night, Trump had built large cushions of support in Indiana, Kentucky, Georgia and North Carolina. The trend continued throughout the night. For example, in rural counties across Pennsylvania, the general trend when the votes were counted was that Trump was able to increase both voter growth and margins of support in the GOP heartland.
A clear example of this rural upswing: Lackawanna County, President Joe Biden’s hometown of Scranton, swung 5.6 points to the right since 2020 — even though Kamala Harris still looked on course to win the county by the narrowest margin.
The suburban shift toward Democrats stalled
To offset those expected GOP margins of support in rural areas, Democrats will have to rely not only on winning urban centers, but a boost in nearby suburbs. These suburbs have been trending toward Democrats since 2016 — but it’s unclear today if this leftward drift continues.
The first clear sign of trouble in the suburbs came in Northern Virginia’s Loudoun County, Washington, D.C., a suburb with a large concentration of college-educated voters. Joe Biden won it by about 25 points in 2020; This year, Harris seems to have won it by about 17 points.
In Hamilton County, Indiana, seen as an early indicator of other trends perhaps because of the Indianapolis suburbs, Harris trailed Trump by about 6 points — even nearly running with Biden’s performance in 2020 (Trump +7).
Still, that Democratic trend continued in other suburbs across the country. For example, in suburban counties around Atlanta, Harris was on track to do slightly better than Biden in 2020, increasing the Democratic margin in Cobb and Gwinnett counties by nearly a point.
Democratic support among voters of color, particularly Latinos, continues to decline
Pre-election polling indicated that Trump was on track to post historic gains in support among non-white voters. While we don’t have great national data yet (early exit polls can be unreliable), we’ve seen some dramatic changes from places with large Latino populations.
The most obvious example is Florida. The state has moved in a decidedly Republican direction, and so have its Latino voters. Miami-Dade County, once a reliably Democratic county with a large Cuban American population, swung to double digits for Trump. Osceola, a county with a large Puerto Rican community, also flipped to Trump, after Biden won it by 14 points. And more specifically, cities with large Puerto Rican and Cuban populations, such as Kissimmee and Hialeah, have seen dramatic declines in Democratic support, according to Democratic organizations. Analysis by Equis Research. One caveat: Florida’s Latino population is different than the rest of the country — it’s much more diverse in terms of national origins and already skews Republican after 2020.
Still, a similar swing occurred in South Texas, where Trump widened his margin in counties won in 2020, Zapata; two other counties (Starr and Cameron); And almost even ran with Harris in Hidalgo and Webb counties. Outside of these two states, which have gone redder, national exit polls, unreliable as they may be, seem to paint a broad picture of eroding Democratic support with Latinos: Preliminary results Suggest Democrats just won a majority of these voters, after 2020 exit polls indicated Biden would win by about two-thirds.
