Trump’s gains in each of the seven swing states was smaller than the national figure, although his pickup in Arizona and Nevada nearly matched his nationwide improvement.
The fact that Trump did especially well in Arizona and Nevada no doubt speaks in part to his success in gaining ground among Latino voters.
Trump made significant gains in seemingly solid blue states.
In post-election analysis, exit polls are typically the dominant form, both for enhancing understanding of what happened and for launching polemics over how to interpret an outcome. But raw vote tallies are also highly instructive about the strengths and weaknesses of parties and candidates. They also offer clues about what the future portends. The differences across states can pinpoint potential problems each party faces over the long run and their potential weaknesses even in their most loyal bastions.
The near final vote count—Donald Trump at 77,266,801 (49.9%) and Kamala Harris at 74,981,313 votes (48.4%)—belies talk of a mandate for the president-elect.1 On the positive side for Trump, he won roughly three million more votes in 2024 than he did four years ago. Harris received 6.3 million fewer votes than Joe Biden received in 2020. As we’ll see, every state showed a swing in Trump’s favor compared with 2020. On the other hand, his 1.5% lead in the popular vote was smaller than Hillary Clinton’s 2.1% advantage over Trump when she won the popular vote while losing the Electoral College in 2016. Trump’s was the third smallest margin for a victorious candidate since 1888.
Overall, the popular vote swung by six points in Trump’s favor. (The swing is a measure of the move from Biden’s 4.5% margin to Trump’s 1.5%.) The national swing is a good baseline for comparison of how each candidate did, state by state.
Trump’s gains in each of the seven swing states was smaller than the national figure, although his pickup in Arizona and Nevada nearly matched his nationwide improvement. The average in the swing states was 3.5%. One hypothesis for what happened: These states experienced the campaign with an intensity unmatched by any other part of the country. Their voters saw more advertising and received more visits from the candidates. The fact that Harris did better in states that received the most information and persuasion from both sides might suggest that her campaign had some positive effect—even if, of course, it can’t be called “successful” since she lost all seven states. Put another way, the more voters saw of the campaign, the less they were inclined to move away from the Democrats.
An alternative explanation, as my Brookings colleague William Galston pointed out, is that many of these states are more closely and durably divided than the nation as a whole—they are called “swing states” for a reason. Between 2016 and 2020, four of them (Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Nevada) also experienced shifts at levels below the national swing. On the other hand, the shifts in Georgia, Michigan, and Arizona from Clinton to Biden were above the national figure. They might be seen as the “swingiest” of the swing states. Especially striking is Georgia: At 5.3%, its 2016 to 2020 swing in a Democratic direction was roughly twice the national figure, and Democrats gave back less than half of their gain in 2024.
Table 1
The fact that Trump did especially well in Arizona and Nevada no doubt speaks in part to his success in gaining ground among Latino voters. The fact that the swings were small in North Carolina and Wisconsin may be an indicator of very high levels of organization undertaken by their state Democratic parties. The shift in Wisconsin to Trump was the smallest of any swing state. That Georgia and North Carolina had very small swings suggests that these two southern states will now be in the ranks of highly competitive states for some time to come. This will also be true of Michigan and Pennsylvania which once again delivered small margins of victory.
Table 2
For Democrats, the most challenging news of the election came in states solidly in their camp. The large swings toward Trump in New York suggested a resurgence of Republicanism first visible in the 2022 midterm elections—even if 2024 Democrats recovered some of the House seats they lost three years ago in the state. The big swing in New Jersey and Harris’ relatively small margin of victory suggest at least the possibility that the Garden State could move from being a solidly Democratic to more contested terrain. This will make New Jersey’s governor race in 2025 a particularly telling test. California, Massachusetts, and, to a slightly lesser degree, Rhode Island remain solidly Democratic, but the large swings suggest some disillusionment with Democrats. In the case of California and New York, the Latino swing to Trump no doubt played a role. And urban and metropolitan challenges around crime, homelessness, high rents and a shortage of affordable homes were clearly a factor.
As the political writer Harold Meyerson, noted, California experienced a roughly 10% drop in turnout between 2020 and 2024. “Some of the most Democratic counties experienced the greatest drop in turnout,” he wrote in The American Prospect, “with the state’s mega-county—Los Angeles, home to ten million Californians—experiencing the largest, with a 14% drop.” Except in “the handful of the state’s swing congressional districts,” there was little effort by Democrats to turn out the vote in Harris’ home state, which she was certain to win. As a result, Harris received 1.834 million fewer votes than Biden. Trump was up only very slightly, roughly 75,000 votes in a state that cast over 15 million ballots. The drop in Democratic participation thus accounted for a large share of the swing toward Trump. But California Democrats will be searching for reasons beyond organizational issues for the demobilization of their electorate. As Meyerson noted, the passage by a wide margin of a statewide proposition toughening criminal penalties—and the defeat of progressive district attorneys in Democratic Los Angeles and Alameda Counties—were signs of discontent over crime rates. “The semi-ubiquity of the homeless in California cities,” he added, “has now propelled many upper-middle-class liberals, too, to embrace policies intended to limit urban disorder.”
A turnout drop also hurt Harris in New York, but the state also saw a significant increase in Trump’s vote. Harris received 625,691 fewer votes than Biden did; Trump received 326,902 more votes in 2024 than he did in 2020. One can fairly conclude that about half the New York Republican swing can be explained by a Democratic turnout drop while the other half is owed to GOP converts or new voters. In New Jersey, the fall in Democratic turnout was the larger factor. Harris was down 640,185 on the Biden vote; Trump was up 84,902 on his 2020 vote.
Table 3
Outcomes in the rest of the Northeast were less dramatic, but a swing to Trump marked New Hampshire as a competitive state for the future, as it has been in the past. Biden’s 2020 advantage may have been exceptional, not a new norm. Maine will also continue to be a moderately competitive state, especially given Republican strength in its more rural congressional district. Maine and Nebraska are the only states that award electoral votes by congressional district and not just the statewide result.
Table 4
The Pacific Coast states outside of California showed very little change, and swings were remarkably small in Oregon and Washington. Hawaii’s swing was the largest but close to the national swing, and it remains the region’s most Democratic state.
Table 5
In keeping with what happened in New York and California, the largest swing to Trump in the Midwest was in the region’s most loyally Democratic state, Illinois, though the swing there was significantly smaller than in the other two bastions. As in 2016, Minnesota proved to be a more competitive state than its Democratic reputation would suggest. The small swing in Kansas, which has a Democratic governor, suggests that among Republican states, it might in the long run be more open to Democratic inroads than other Republican states. Nebraska is something of an outlier, a partial swing state, because the two campaigns actively fought for the congressional district based in Omaha, which Harris, like Biden, won.
Table 6
Stability was the rule in the Mountain West, with all six states experiencing swings lower than the nationwide shift. The relative closeness of New Mexico is a warning sign for Democrats and, again, a sign of the shift in Latino voters toward Trump. The very small swing in Utah reflects its particularism in the Trump era: It is broadly conservative, especially outside the Salt Lake City area, but the state’s Mormon community has been somewhat more resistant to Trump than other conservative religious groups.
Table 7
The biggest swings in the South reflected two of the major achievements of the Trump campaign and two of the most troubling portents of 2024 for Democrats. Barack Obama carried Florida in both 2008 and 2012, but it has been moving steadily toward the Republicans, and the swing to Trump in 2024 was one of his largest in the nation. Texas, a state Democrats had been hoping to make competitive for many electoral cycles, swung nearly as hard Trump’s way. In both states, Trump’s gains among Latino voters were a substantial part of the story. If California and New York are big state anchors for Democrats in the Electoral College, Texas and Florida play the same role for Republicans. They show few signs of shifting away.
The other warning for Democrats: Trump cut the Democrats’ margin in Virginia almost in half. While the state remains Democratic, the state’s Republican drift began with Governor Glenn Youngkin’s 2021 victory. Virginia, like New Jersey, will elect a new governor in 2025. (Youngkin is term-limited.) While 2024 showed that midterm elections (especially in the Trump era) are far from predictive of what will happen in a presidential year, that race will be a test of whether or not Youngkin’s victory four years ago was a part of a larger trend.