The 2024 presidential race was a closer call than many would have you think. The triumphant President-elect Donald Trump secured a decisive victory in the Electoral College, yet edged out Vice President Kamala Harris in the popular vote by a mere 1.5 percentage points, leaving a razor-thin margin of 49.8 percent to 48.3 percent, demonstrating how neck-and-neck the race truly was. However, Trump’s victory scene was significantly magnified due to the dramatic shift towards conservative values as compared to the voting patterns of 2020. While President Biden may had outpaced Trump by approximately 4.5 points at the national level four years ago, the 2024 elections took a swing to the right by about 6 points making it the largest tilt in favour of any party since 2008.
The national statistics only unveil a fraction of the overall picture. The most intriguing facet of this year’s election was the sweeping surge of support for Trump across all regions, be it the 50 states or District of Columbia, or an unbelievable majority of the 3000 plus counties in the United States. Against his performance in 2020, Trump may not have scaled monumental mountains, but he managed to score better almost everywhere. This trend can be validated by examining the state and county level data.
In an amazing outcome, every American state leaned towards the right in 2024. Historically, majority states usually sway in favour of the party showing an improved performance as compared to the past elections. However, it’s quite rare for all states to carry the same political current, even in situations where one candidate has a decisive win. This can be attributed to alterations in party composition and differential appeal of the candidates that can lead different states to go different ways. But in 2024, all the states and D.C. swayed in the right direction based on their margins compared to the 2020 race, marking it as both a historic and unique election year.
This is the first time since 1976 that all electoral components had a relative right swing compared to their previous voting pattern. Unlike 1976, every state and D.C. leaned right in 2024, despite the previous election being highly combative. The 1976 race, won by Jimmy Carter, followed a landslide victory in 1972 when Richard Nixon commandeered 49 states and won the national votes by 23-point margin, marking it as the greatest popular vote lead a candidate has achieved post World War II. Thus, the leftward shift in 1976 was more of a correction to the preceding landslide.
Contrastingly, since the 1976 swing, even when larger swings have occurred, at least one state in those contests leaned towards the losing party. For instance, during Ronald Reagan’s sweeping win in 1984, despite his substantial improvement over his 1980 margin, seven states and DC still voted more Democratic than four years prior. In 1988, the Republicans lost their grip in 49 states but marginally improved over Reagan’s lead in Tennessee and D.C. Even as recently as Obama’s largest margin win in 2008, five predominantly red states trended rightward.
However, the magnitude of the rightward swing in each state differed considerably in 2024. New York stands apart with an over 10 points shift towards the right, where Harris barely managed to win. Other populous states like New Jersey and California that traditionally lean blue and major red states like Florida and Texas similarly saw significant rightward shifts. Nevertheless, 36 states and D.C. experienced a smaller shift than the weighted average.
The states that saw a more moderate rightward shift tend to be less populous and subsequently more rural, but also include most of the seven principal swing states that saw the most significant campaign efforts and investment during the 2024 election. Among these battleground states, Arizona and Nevada recognized rightward shifts that were either greater or equivalent to the average. In contrast, Michigan only drifted by 4.2 points to the right, and the other four key swing states, namely Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin all deviated by less than three points.
The smallest rightward shift, of just one point, was seen in Washington state – moving from a Biden lead of 19 points to a Harris lead of 18 points. The Washington results serve as a stark reminder to not place all bets on a single data point when predicting future trends. Even though Democrats had a stronger performance in the state’s top-two primary results in 2024 than in 2020 or 2022, the November results still led to Republicans performing significantly better nationally than in 2020, and similarly to their 2022 result in the national popular vote for the House.
A shift towards the right, generally translates into more gains for that party across the majority of the nation’s counties, as shown in the county-level data. However, merely counting the number of more conservative-leaning (often rural) counties tilting in a particular direction isn’t a particularly useful approach. It’s more insightful to consider the share of the national vote that resides in counties leaning one way or the other, thus accounting for vast differences in population across counties.
By this yardstick, President Trump’s victory in 2024 showcased a broad-based support. As compared to the 2020 election, a significant 92 percent of voters resided in counties leaning towards Trump, in stark contrast to a meager 8 percent that leaned towards Harris. This kind of span is only rivaled by Obama’s victory in 2008, where the leftward swing was mirrored in counties where 92 percent of the voters reside.
Nonetheless, the depth of Trump’s rightward swing in 2024 was less steep than Obama’s leftward swing in 2008, which isn’t surprising as the 2008 election resulted in a higher national swing (9.7 points to the left). More than half of all votes in 2008 came from places swinging at least 10 points to the left. In comparison, in 2024, merely 11 percent of votes came from counties swinging more than 10 points to the right, while a whopping 81 percent came from regions shifting anywhere 0 to 10 points in favor of the right.
However, Trump’s progressive gains across a large swath of the country in 2024 makes for a curious case when compared to other recent races, save for 2008. Notably, Obama’s reelection in 2012 showed a rightward swing of 3.4 points for the whole country. Yet, that year, about one in every four votes still came from counties that were swinging towards the left. A similar story unfolded in 2020: Even though Biden swung the nation about 2.4 points to the left from 2016, a little over one in four votes still came from counties swaying right towards Trump.
Additional data unearthed a consistent pattern of shift from 2020 to 2024 across the country. On a scale of -1 to 1, the correlation between each county’s margin in 2020 and 2024 was a near-perfect 0.995 – showing a strong positive association and the firmest link between the results of any two consecutive elections since the beginning of the 21st century. This does not mean that the results in each county were identical for both elections. Rather, it signals that, generally, the more a county voted Republican in 2020, the more it tended to vote Republican in 2024.
These consistent nationwide shifts suggest two potential insights. First, the 2024 dramatic swing, reminiscent of the 2008 shift during a time of financial and global turmoil, points towards deep-seated, fundamental reasons for the shift, such as economic discontent, immigration issues and high disapproval of the incumbent president, which all served as wind in Trump’s sail.
The consistent shifts at the county level may also imply forecastable future. Even minor directional shifts could be a sign of things to come. It’s important to note, Trump improved most in areas that were more urban and more culturally diverse. Thus, the 2024 results could carry significant weight when predicting the 2028 election results, implying that even minor shifts in this election could potentially redefine the political panorama for the coming years.
This reconfiguration could then lead to long-term changes in the core makeup of the parties and voter preferences, altering the trajectory of future elections. While it’s early to predict exactly how this will unfold, it’s clear that the 2024 election results have laid the groundwork for an intriguing political landscape.