Where Trump Won: The Sun Belt

In the South and the West, as in the Midwest, the Trump campaign’s victory depended upon the big cities and the suburbs.

W here did Donald Trump find the votes to sweep all seven battleground states in this presidential election? I previously examined that question by looking at the county-by-county breakdowns of the three Rust Belt swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. In this second installment, I will look at the Sun Belt battlegrounds of Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, and North Carolina.

But first, here’s another illustration from the Rust Belt states. To drive home my point about Pennsylvania, here’s a visualization of the counties where the margin swung at least 1,500 votes in Trump’s direction compared with 2020, or (in three cases, marked in blue) swung very slightly against Trump. The geographic distribution of the biggest swings (the largest in red, then in brown) are striking:

Here’s a similar map for Michigan, looking at counties that swung by at least 2,000 votes for Trump or (in four cases, marked in blue) swung against him:

Again, the concentration of the swing in Trump’s favor is very heavy in and around Detroit.

Arizona

The Sun Belt battlegrounds divide into two separate and distinct theaters. Arizona and Nevada are both western states with a large Hispanic population and a small black population. Arizona, in particular, is on the front lines of the Mexican border. Going into this election season, Arizona was a historically Republican state trending blue, while Nevada has been a blue state since the Obama years but elected a Republican governor in 2022. Arizona has a lot of suburban retirees; Nevada’s population is much younger and more heavily working-class and dominated by the Las Vegas casinos:

Maricopa County is the 800-pound gorilla of the swing states. Sixty percent of Arizona’s electorate lives there. It includes Phoenix, now the fifth-largest city in the nation, and Mesa, a city of half a million people. Trump won the county in 2016, lost it in 2020, and spent several years impugning its integrity as a result. His margin of defeat there in 2020 was four times his margin of defeat statewide. His lickspittle Kari Lake got crushed there in 2022, and was blown out there again in 2024, running 176,000 votes behind Trump in the county.

But Trump won Maricopa this time, improving his showing in the county by 116,624 votes — ten times what he needed to flip Arizona. In two other counties, deep-blue Pima and red Pinal, Trump improved by enough votes in that county alone to reclaim Arizona. Yet again, the bulk of Trump’s vote gains came in the most densely populated parts of the state.

In Pinal County, reflecting its explosive population growth (it’s more than doubled in size since 2000), the Republican vote grew from 62,079 votes for Mitt Romney in 2012 to 72,819 for Trump in 2016, 107,077 for Trump in 2020, and 126,926 for Trump in 2024:

The biggest and most dramatic vote swings for Trump on a percentage basis in Arizona were in two deep-blue counties, Apache and Santa Cruz. They, along with Yuma County, all saw Trump improve his share of the vote by double digits. Apache is notable for being a supermajority Native American county (neighboring Navajo County also has a very large Native American population).

Nevada

Another swing state, another big-city county that made all the difference. Clark County is the home of Las Vegas and more than two-thirds of Nevada voters. Its population density is ten times that of the state as a whole (due in part to the fact that the federal government owns 68 percent of Nevada’s land). Trump didn’t win Clark, but he cut his margin of defeat there by 63,787 votes in a state he lost by 33,596 in 2020. Easily the next largest shift was in another populous blue-leaning county, Washoe:

As was true elsewhere, the swings proportional to the population were not as concentrated in the populous counties. The swings against Trump were almost entirely a feature of lower turnout in extremely sparsely populated red counties, such as Esmerelda County, where 461 people voted.

Georgia

The other half of the Sun Belt was Georgia and North Carolina, two states of the old South with large black populations, comparatively small Hispanic populations, a long history of racially polarized voting, and booming populations full of Northern transplants who are pushing the states in a bluer direction. Georgia has drawn more people south through a combination of corporate relocations and a lot of black Americans (many of them ancestral Georgians) moving back south. North Carolina has a booming tech sector but also, like Arizona, a lot of retirees chasing a lower cost of living:

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Trump swung enough votes just in populous, blue DeKalb County in the Atlanta suburbs (12,777) to erase his 11,779-vote deficit from 2020, which had resulted not only in Trump’s campaign to smear the Atlanta-area counties but also his indictment in Fulton County. His vote gains of at least 3,000 votes per county in Georgia all came in counties with population densities above the statewide average, and were disproportionately concentrated in the Atlanta area. He even picked up 2,868 votes relative to 2020 in Fulton. He still lost Gwinnett by 16.5 points, DeKalb by 64.7 points, and Fulton by 44.9 points, but the margins in DeKalb, in particular, were aided by lower turnout there, bucking the statewide trend of very high turnout (so much for “Jim Crow 2.0”). I marked on the map every county where Trump improved his margin by at least 2,000 votes, or in blue where his margin got worse:

Both Georgia and North Carolina had more of those counties than the other swing states. At least in Georgia, that reflects the divisions in the state and its fluid demographics:

Across the seven swing states, Henry County, Georgia, was the worst single county for Trump. His margin of defeat there surged from 25,184 votes in 2020 to 38,272 votes, more than doubling the size of the hill he needed to climb in the rest of the state. Turnout was up slightly more than the statewide average, but the bigger issue is that Henry went from a 59.7 percent to 39.2 percent Biden county to a 64.2 percent to 34.7 percent Harris county. The story in this and similar counties in the outer Atlanta suburbs seems to be one of white flight: The demographics are shifting toward a larger concentration of black citizens (which, in Henry and some of the others, has resulted in movements to have various towns and neighborhoods secede from their municipality or county). In spite of Trump’s inroads at the margins with black voters, a significant population shift of that nature will naturally favor the Democrat — especially in an election in which Democrats switched from a white candidate to a black candidate.

North Carolina

Unlike in the other six swing states, Trump didn’t need to improve his standing in North Carolina; he just had to prevent its erosion. Nonetheless, he improved by 10,204 votes in blue Mecklenburg County, home of Charlotte, which he nonetheless lost by 32.7 points:

On a percentage basis, there were more big swings to Trump in more modestly sized red counties, some of them with vastly increased turnout, but there was also small, blue Hertford County, a majority-black county on the Virginia border in the east of the state:

There is, however, a complicating factor mostly unique to North Carolina (although it affected parts of Georgia): Hurricane Helene. Twenty-seven North Carolina counties were declared eligible for disaster assistance after the devastating hurricane. Based on local media reports, nine of those were especially hard hit. Here’s a map of the state with those counties highlighted, and the hardest-hit counties in green:

 

By and large, with a few notable exceptions, the hurricane-impacted areas included many of the reddest counties in the state. Indeed, Trump lost North Carolina outside of those 27 counties. The three major blue counties in the hurricane’s path were Mecklenburg, Forsyth (home of Winston-Salem), and Buncombe (home of Asheville), the last of which was one of the hardest-hit counties.

Statewide, turnout was up 3.4 percent versus 2020 in counties outside the disaster zone, 3.2 percent in the 18 counties less-affected, but only 1.1 percent in the nine hardest-hit counties. North Carolina made heroic efforts to make voting easy and available to people displaced or otherwise affected by the hurricane, and unsurprisingly, that worked for a lot of people who had time to get their power back on and get back in their homes. But, just as we saw in New York and New Jersey in 2012 after Sandy, the places that bore the brunt of Biblically devastating flooding just weren’t close enough to normal to avoid reduced turnout.

It’s not surprising that this correlated with only a tepid improvement for Trump in two of the nine counties and a drop-off in six. Even aside from whether the hurricane response by Democratic governor Roy Cooper and the Biden administration changed any minds, we would expect Trump’s base voters to be disproportionately the more rurally located voters, and thus those bearing the heaviest brunt of the flooding and dislocation in western North Carolina. Whatever the causes, it’s clear that the hurricane zone bucked the broader trend of shifts in Trump’s direction.

Conclusion

Unlike in 2016, Donald Trump didn’t win this time largely on the basis of low Democrat turnout, and unlike in 2020, he didn’t face such elevated Democrat turnout that it swamped his voters. Democrats lost some supporters who stayed home from the supercharged 2020 election, but Trump also won over a decisive share of their voters. And across the battleground states in three distinct regions of the country, he disproportionately did so in the big cities and suburbs that were the death of his 2020 campaign. At long last, the most thoroughly urban character ever to run for the American presidency found his footing in the big city.