The common national experience that explains Trump’s 2024 gains

Analysis by Ronald Brownstein, CNN

(CNN) — The most impressive aspect of Donald Trump’s victory over Vice President Kamala Harris last week was the uniformity of his gains across the electoral landscape.

But paradoxically, the very magnitude of his gains may offer Democrats their best hope of recovery in the next few elections. The across-the-board nature of Trump’s improvement suggests that his victory wasn’t primarily driven by the two campaigns’ tactical choices, messaging decisions or advertising strategies.

Trump gained ground in urban, suburban and rural counties and improved on his vote share, as of the latest counts, in 49 of the 50 states. A preliminary CNN analysis concluded that Trump ran better than he did in 2020 in fully 9 in 10 of the nation’s counties where results are available.

Those sweeping gains document how much ground Democrats lost this year — not only in places where they were bracing for further retreat (including both in rural communities and urban centers) but also the racially diverse, well-educated suburbs that had earlier keyed the resistance to Trump. Those losses leave Democrats in a weaker electoral position, in most respects, at the start of the second Trump presidency than at the outset of his first.

But the scale of Trump’s advance this year points toward a common national experience in all regions of the country — a shared disappointment in the results generated by President Joe Biden’s administration, primarily on inflation, but secondarily around other issues led by immigration and crime. The evidence that the outcome was driven largely by a negative verdict on Biden’s performance underscores the possibility that Democrats could recover sooner than now seems possible if Americans one day conclude that Trump hasn’t delivered the better results he has promised.

The consistency of the Democratic decline this year “reflects a very broad sense of discontent across many different demographic groups, across every major population group, with the direction of the country under Biden,” said Emory University political scientist Alan Abramowitz. Trump and the GOP, he said, face the same risk of reversal if the president-elect pursues some of the policies that voters remained uneasy about even as they voted for him — especially if he can’t ease the cost-of-living squeeze that drove much of this year’s result.

Experts agree that factors beyond disappointment in the Biden administration’s outcomes also influenced the results. These ranged from a widening cultural gap between Democrats and Latinos, especially men, to continuing resistance among some voters to entrusting the presidency to a woman, to the GOP’s successful efforts to portray Harris as an extremist cultural liberal largely through attacks on views about transgender issues she expressed during her 2020 presidential campaign.

But more targeted dynamics can’t explain a shift as comprehensive as the one the country experienced last week. Harris’ loss, as a quasi-incumbent, followed a well-established pattern: When an outgoing president faces widespread discontent over his performance, his party has almost always failed to hold the White House in the election to succeed him. (That dynamic applied when Democrats Harry Truman in 1952 and Lyndon Johnson in 1968 stepped down rather than seek reelection, and again in 2008 with Republican George W. Bush leaving office after his two terms.)

“People struggle to find explanations for what is going on with Hispanic men, or with young people, but the most common explanation [to all of them] is the right one,” said UCLA political scientist Lynn Vavreck, the co-author of well-respected books on the 2016 and 2020 elections. “Nobody thinks things are going well, and if you are the incumbent you own that.”

Two sophisticated new geographic analyses of the results underscore just how powerful and pervasive the movement toward Trump was this year. One comes from the Daily Yonder website published by the nonpartisan Center for Rural Studies.

The center has developed a system that categorizes the nation’s roughly 3,100 counties into six categories from the most urban (major metro core counties) to the most rural (nonmetropolitan counties). In between, the center divides counties into the categories of suburbs of those major cities; medium-sized cities; the suburbs of those medium-sized cities; small communities; and the rural, nonmetropolitan counties.

According to the preliminary analysis of the election results the group provided to me, Trump gained in all six kinds of counties — and by strikingly similar amounts. Trump improved his vote by 4 percentage points in each of the two most populous categories —the major metro core counties and their suburbs — and by 3 percentage points in each of the other four groupings of smaller places.

This was a more consistent rise than the center has recorded across the spectrum of urban-rural counties in any recent election. From 2004 to 2008, Barack Obama improved on John Kerry’s performance in all six kinds of counties, but Obama’s gains varied more — from about 3 points in the smallest places to roughly double that in the largest. From 2008 to 2012, Obama improved slightly in the three groupings of largest places but lost ground in the three smaller categories. In 2016, Hillary Clinton ran better than Obama in the largest places, but Trump ran far better than Mitt Romney, the GOP’s 2012 nominee, in the smaller ones.

Tellingly, the closest recent comparison to Trump’s uniform gains this year was Biden’s performance four years ago. Biden improved on Clinton’s share of the vote by between 1.5 to 2 percentage points in all of the center’s categories of midsized counties, and by 0.5 points in the two poles of their scale: the very largest urban centers and the smallest rural places.

Biden in 2020 did not gain ground across the country in as large a percentage of counties as Trump did in 2024. But, as the center’s data showed, Biden then, like Trump now, improved quite consistently across the map, from the most urban to the most rural places.

Abramowitz says the state-level results send a similar message about how much Trump’s electoral recovery this year resembles his decline four years earlier. In 2020, five states flipped from Trump to Biden; in 2024, they all flipped back to Trump (as did Nevada, which narrowly backed Biden four years ago). In 2020, Biden won Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, the three former “blue wall” states that decided the election, by a combined 257,029 votes. As of last weekend, Trump led in those three states, all of which he won, by a combined margin of 256,940 votes.

In all, Biden in 2020, according to the CNN analysis, improved over Clinton’s showing four years before in 42 states. That’s not as many as moved toward Trump this year; but both elections, Abramowitz noted, look quite different from the much more mixed results of 2016, when Trump improved on the GOP’s 2012 performance in 38 states but lost ground in 13 others.

Vavreck said Trump’s first election in 2016 produced a lasting ideological and demographic “reshuffling” that moved states with large populations of non-college White voters (such as Iowa and Ohio) toward the GOP while cementing the Democratic advantage in diverse and well-educated states that became light blue during the Obama years (Colorado and Virginia).

But since then, she said, the similarly uniform shift away from Trump in 2020 — and then back toward him in 2024 — points toward voter assessments of performance, rather than big further ideological shifts, as the main driver of the results. Just as Trump, as the incumbent, suffered from a negative verdict on his performance in 2020, Harris, as the quasi-incumbent successor to Biden, suffered from a negative verdict on the president’s performance four years later.

“A lot of that is kind of pure retrospective voting: Things are not going well, so kick the incumbent out,” Vavreck said. “In 2020, Biden picks up everywhere. Now we look from ’20 to ’24 and the Democrats are losing [ground] everywhere.”

A second new geographic analysis of the 2024 election results also underscores the comprehensive nature of Trump’s gains. The center-left Brookings Metro think tank for several years has correlated the election results with federal data that records how much each county contributes to the nation’s total economic output.

Those analyses consistently have found that Democrats now dominate the nation’s highest-output counties, which tend to be large metro areas that have transitioned the fastest into the 21st century information-age economy. Republicans, meanwhile, run best in places generally on the outskirts of the major metro areas that are more dependent on the powerhouse industries of the 20th century: agriculture, energy extraction and manufacturing.

The group’s new analysis shows those divisions largely holding this year. “The first thing to say is that the country remains extremely divided economically,” said Mark Muro, a senior fellow at Brookings Metro who directs this research. “That hasn’t changed.”

But the results this year also show Trump establishing what Muro called a “toehold” in the nation’s most productive metro areas, particularly across the Sun Belt. In 2020, Trump won just five of the 100 counties that contributed the most to the nation’s overall economic output, while Biden carried an astounding 95. This year, Trump has already won 17 of the 100 most productive counties and Harris 78 (with five still to be called).

Trump’s gains in those very high-output counties, as well as his success in flipping at least another roughly 70 counties from blue to red, has dramatically increased the share of national economic output contributed by the places that support him. In 2020, Biden won only a little more than one-sixth of the nation’s counties, but the places he captured generated over 70% of the nation’s total economic output. This year, Trump has already won counties that account for 40% of the nation’s economic output (with 161 counties still to be called at the time Brookings conducted this analysis late last week).

The highest-output counties Trump flipped were almost entirely in the Sun Belt: from Hillsborough (Tampa) and Tarrant (Fort Worth) to Maricopa (Phoenix). Trump’s recapture of Maricopa was especially dramatic, after Biden in 2020 became the first Democratic presidential nominee to carry the county since Truman in 1948.

Muro says Trump’s gains in high-output metros across the Sun Belt, like his support from Elon Musk and other conservative Silicon Valley leaders, show Trump’s potential to establish a beachhead in new-economy bastions that almost all viewed him with suspicion during his first term. “This is the sort of the leading edge of the Trump governing base that now has picked up a number of significant economic centers in addition to its literally thousands of small-town and rural places,” Muro said.

The question, Muro said, is whether Trump can preserve that beachhead while pursuing policies he pledged, such as the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, sweeping tariffs, rescinding the Biden-passed incentives for clean energy and possibly also semiconductor manufacturing, and potentially moving to restrict civil rights and liberties. “The Trump agenda,” Muro said, “does not seem like one conducive to maximizing the output of the country and particularly the dense blue metros.”

Muro’s question about the high-output metros applies more broadly: While disappointment with Biden provided a huge lift for Republicans last week, moving forward Trump will need to sustain support on the strength of his own agenda, leadership style and results.

The exit polls conducted by Edison Research for a consortium of media organizations including CNN, as well as the VoteCast study done by NORC in partnership with the Associated Press and other media organizations, made clear that even as voters returned Trump to the Oval Office, many of them retained doubts about his agenda and personal style. Across the two studies, a majority of voters described Trump as “too extreme” and likely to steer the US toward authoritarianism, while majorities also expressed opposition to his mass deportation plan; majorities also indicated support for legal abortion and a greater government role in ensuring health care coverage for Americans.

The surveys made clear that those concerns were submerged by the towering discontent with the results of the Biden presidency. In the exit polls, about three-fifths of voters said they disapproved of Biden’s performance, and two-thirds described the economy in negative terms. About 80% of the voters who disapproved of Biden voted for Trump, as did about 70% of those who expressed negative views about the economy, the exit polls found.

As a result of those cross-cutting pressures, a critical share of voters who expressed concerns about Trump or his agenda in the two surveys voted for him anyway: For instance, one-fourth of women who described themselves as supporting legal abortion in the exit polls still voted for Trump. So did about one-fourth of Latinos who said in the exit polls they opposed mass deportation. About 1 in 8 voters who described Trump as too extreme, or said he would lead the US toward authoritarianism, likewise backed him anyway.

Vavreck said it should be surprising that even many voters resistant to elements of Trump’s agenda prioritized more immediate concerns — particularly their frustration over the cost of living, as well as issues such as the border and crime. Those frustrations created an almost insuperable barrier for Harris.

But in a little over two months, Trump, once again, will be the incumbent. And in Vavreck’s phrase, he and his party will own the results of the coming years. If Americans feel he has made progress on the problems they elected him to solve, he will likely maintain a strong position. But if they feel he has not, or if they conclude he has created new problems with his policies, there could be a turn away from Trump and the GOP in the 2026 and 2028 elections that is just as uniform as the movement toward them last week.

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