Unlike 2016, when Donald Trump won the presidential election without obtaining a majority of votes nationally, the Republican president-elect can boast of having won the popular vote. But the almost final results, one month after the November 5 election, show that, far from the steamroller initially anticipated, he only has 2.3 million votes more than his Democratic rival Kamala Harris. The margin between the two candidates is only 1.49 percentage points, one of the smallest gaps since the end of the 19th century.e century.
Donald Trump's success constitutes less of a plebiscite than a fall for the Democratic camp, according to exit polls and the results analyzed by The World. Because if it records progress in 80% of counties, including in “blue” strongholds (the color of the Democrats), its gains compared to 2020 are significantly lower than the losses recorded by the Democrats.
Between 2020 and 2024, Democrats lost twice as many votes as Donald Trump gained
Results of the presidential election in the United States in 2020 and 2024, in millions of votes.
Democrats
Republicans
Large cities were undermobilized, unlike the countryside
Analysis of vote gains and losses from both camps reveals that Kamala Harris “underperformed” in big cities, while Trump consolidated or even improved his 2020 performance in cities, but especially in the countryside.
According to the New York Timesin the counties of the three most populous metropolises (New York, Los Angeles and Chicago), the blue losses are abysmal: 1.5 million votes less for Harris, compared to Joe Biden in 2020. In the ten largest cities, two million votes were lost by Democrats between 2020 and 2024, while Mr. Trump gained “only” 254,000.
This scenario is found in the seven swing states, which all swung in favor of Mr. Trump, as shown by the analysis of votes by county.
How Kamala Harris lost the swing states
and losses
of candidates for the 2024 presidential election by county compared to 2020 in number of votes.
In Nevada, everything was decided in Clark County, which includes Las Vegas and concentrates seven out of ten voters in the state. In this strategic county, won by Democrats since 1992, Donald Trump lost by only 2.6 points, the slimmest margin since 1988, due to the shift to the right of Hispanic and Asian voters, who make up more than 40% of the local population.
+749 votes
+81,315 votes
Clark County
While Trump was trailing by 26 points in the Latino electorate four years ago, this year he is on par, and even leads Kamala Harris by three points among voters of Asian origin when he had them lost by… 29 points in 2020.
In Wisconsin, Donald Trump gained ground in counties where Hispanics are most numerous, including in Democratic strongholds like Milwaukee. By consolidating his lead in all the worker-dominated counties of the state, Trump gave Kamala Harris no chance
The darkest counties are those whose Republican vote has increased by at least 20 points since 2012.
-37,213 votes
+87 114 votes
The Democrat only made progress in the affluent, traditionally Republican suburbs of Milwaukee, thanks to her assertive strategy of refocusing.
In neighboring Michigan, Mr. Trump is making progress almost everywhere, including in Wayne County, which includes the city of Detroit and its southern suburbs, and whose population is 48% white and 38% black. The Democratic margin fell by 9 points, which translates into 85,000 votes for the Democrats.
-80,016 votes
+154,963 votes
Wayne County
With such an underperformance in a county that is supposed to be their largest source of votes in the entire state, the 154,000 vote lead that Democrats had gained in 2020 evaporated very quickly, leaving Kamala Harris has no chance of winning this state.
Minorities abstained or swiped right
The progress of Donald Trump, both at the national level and in the “swing states” can also be explained by the considerable evolution of the vote of black, Hispanic and Asian electorates.
NBC News' analysis of the results by county shows that all minorities slid further to the right than the rest of the country. The vote of Asian Americans has shifted 6.2 points toward the Republicans in four years, twice as much as the national median (3.2 points). This is almost as much as the Hispanic electorate in the Midwest (6 points) and a little more than the black electorate in the South of the country (5.2 points).
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