It’s a disheartening reality for Democrats: Republican Donald Trump’s support has surged since his last attempt at the presidency.
In his victory over Democrat Kamala Harris, Trump won a larger percentage of the vote in each of the 50 states and Washington, D.C. than he did four years ago. He won more actual votes in 40 states than he did in 2020, according to an Associated Press analysis.
To be sure, Harris’ loss of more than 7 million votes from President Joe Biden’s total in 2020 was a factor in her loss, particularly in swing-state metro areas that were the party’s winning electoral strongholds.
But even though national voter turnout was lower than in the highly enthusiastic 2020 election, Trump received 2.5 million more votes than four years ago. He prevailed over the seven most closely contested states and won a convincing victory in the Electoral College. He became the first Republican candidate in 20 years to win a majority of the popular vote.
Trump overperformed where Harris needed to overperform to win a close election. Now Democrats are considering how to regain ground ahead of the midterm elections in two years, when control of Congress will once again be up for grabs and dozens of governors will be elected.
There were a few notable aspects of how Trump’s victory came about:
Trump has taken a bite out of the northern metropolises
Although Trump improved across the map, his gains were particularly notable in the urban counties that include the cities of Detroit, Milwaukee and Philadelphia – electoral engines that had stalled for Harris in the industrial swing states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania .
Harris lost more than 50,000 votes — and 5 percentage points — fewer than Biden’s total in Wayne County, Michigan, which makes up the lion’s share of the Detroit metropolitan area. In Philadelphia County (Pennsylvania) she was almost 36,000 votes compact of Biden and in Milwaukee County (Wisconsin) she was almost 1,000 votes compact of Biden.
It wasn’t just Harris’ deficit that helped Trump win the states, a trio that Democrats had won together in six of the seven previous elections before Nov. 5.
Trump increased his totals in all three metro areas in 2020, receiving more than 24,000 votes in Wayne County, more than 11,000 in Philadelphia County and nearly 4,000 in Milwaukee County.
It’s too early to determine whether Harris underperformed Biden because Biden voters stayed home or switched their vote to Trump – or how a combination of the two led to the rightward drift seen in each of these states.
Harris advertised heavily and campaigned regularly in both regions, making Milwaukee County her first stop as a candidate with a rally in July. Those swings alone didn’t make the difference in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, but their weaker performance than Biden in the three metros helped Trump, who maintained high 2020 margins in the three states’ immense rural areas and improved in populous suburbs kept stable.
Trump’s team and outside groups supporting him knew from their data that he was making inroads among black voters, particularly black men under 50, who were more concentrated in those urban areas that were crucial to Democratic victories .
When James Blair, Trump’s political director, saw the results from Philadelphia on election night, he knew that Trump had moved into majority-black counties, a gain that would reverberate in Wayne and Milwaukee counties.
“The data made it clear that there was an opportunity here,” Blair said.
AP VoteCast, a nationwide survey of more than 120,000 voters, found that Trump won a larger share of Black and Latino voters than in 2020, especially among men under 45.
Democrats won Senate races in Michigan and Wisconsin but lost in Pennsylvania. In 2026, they will defend governorships in all three states and a Senate seat in Michigan.
Trump has won more in battleground states than Harris
Despite the wave of enthusiasm that Harris’ candidacy generated among the Democratic base when she entered the race in July, she ended up receiving fewer votes than Biden in three of the seven states where she campaigned almost exclusively.
In Arizona she received around 90,000 fewer votes than Biden. In Michigan it received about 67,000 fewer and in Pennsylvania it received 39,000 fewer.
In four others — Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina and Wisconsin — Harris won more votes than Biden. But Trump’s support grew even more – in some states even significantly more.
This energetic is striking in Georgia, where Harris received nearly 73,000 more votes than Biden when he narrowly won the state. But Trump increased his total by more than 200,000 in 2020, putting him on track to win Georgia by about 2 percentage points.
In Wisconsin, Trump’s team responded to the disparities it saw in Republican-leaning districts in suburban Milwaukee by targeting previously Democratic-leaning working-class districts where Trump made notable gains.
In Milwaukee’s three largest suburban counties — Ozaukee, Washington and Waukesha — that have been the backbone of GOP victories for decades, Harris performed better than Biden in 2020. She also won more votes than Trump in 2020, although he still won counties.
That’s why Trump’s focus on Rock County, a blue-collar area in south-central Wisconsin, was crucial. Trump received 3,084 more votes in Rock County, home to the former automobile manufacturing town of Janesville, than he did in 2020, while Harris fell seven votes compact of Biden’s 2020 vote total. That helped Trump offset Harris’ improvement in the Milwaukee suburbs.
The focus speaks to the strength that Trump has had among middle-income and non-college-educated voters and that he continues to build on, said Trump campaign senior data analyst Tim Saler.
“If you have to lean on working-class voters, they are particularly strong in Wisconsin,” Saler said. “We saw huge changes in our favor from 2020 to 2024.”
Trump increased the 2020 total as voter turnout declined in Arizona
Of the seven most competitive states, Arizona saw the smallest augment in the number of votes cast in the presidential race – just over 4,000 votes in a state with more than 3.3 million ballots cast.
That came despite nearly 30 campaign visits to Arizona by Trump, Harris and their running mate, and more than $432 million spent on advertising by the campaign and allied outside groups, according to advertising monitoring firm AdImpact.
In Arizona, the only one of the seven swing states, Harris trailed Biden in tiny, medium and huge counties. In the other six federal states it was able to assert itself in at least one of these categories.
What’s even more telling is that it’s also the only swing state where Trump was able to improve his margin in every single district.
While turnout in Maricopa County, Arizona’s most populous and home to Phoenix, fell slightly from 2020 – by 14,199 votes, a tiny change in a county where more than 2 million people voted – Trump won nearly 56,000 more votes than before four years.
Meanwhile, Harris fell more than 60,000 votes behind Biden’s total, contributing to a shift significant enough to hand the county and state to Trump, who lost Arizona by fewer than 11,000 votes in 2020.
Shift to the right even in strongly democratic areas
The biggest leaps to the right took place not only in Republican-leaning districts, but also in the most Democratic districts in the states. Michigan’s Wayne County swung 9 points toward Trump, tying with Republican-leaning Antrim County for the largest swing in the state.
AP VoteCast found that voters most often said the economy was the most vital issue facing the country in 2024, followed by immigration. The poll found that Trump supporters were more motivated by economic issues and immigration than Harris’s.
“It’s still all about the economy,” said North Carolina Democratic strategist Morgan Jackson, a senior adviser to Democrat Josh Stein, who won the North Carolina governorship on Nov. 5 while Trump also ran the state.
“Democrats need to adopt an economic message that actually works for real people and talk about it in the terms people understand, rather than giving them a dissertation on economic policy,” he said.
The 2026 gubernatorial election gives Democrats a chance to test their understanding and messaging on the issue, said Democratic pollster Margie Omero, whose firm has covered Democratic Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers in the past and the winning Senate candidate this year of Arizona, Ruben Gallego, advised.
“So there is an opportunity to really make sure that the people that governors have a connection with understand the Democrats’ economic message concretely and clearly,” Omero said.
