America's swing to the right in 2024 was wide, if not always deep
Despite what you may have heard, the 2024 election was pretty close. President-elect Donald Trump won a clear victory in the Electoral College, but he leads outgoing Vice President Kamala Harris in the national popular vote by only 1.5 percentage points, 49.8 percent to 48.3 percent* — one of the smallest margins ever in a presidential race.
Nonetheless, the magnitude of Trump's triumph may appear much larger because it featured a major swing to the right from where the nation voted in 2020. As President Joe Biden defeated Trump by about 4.5 points nationally four years ago, Trump's 2024 advantage represents about a 6-point shift to the right, which is the largest swing toward either party since 2008. Back then, Barack Obama's 7.3-point edge represented a nearly 10-point swing to the left from George W. Bush's 2.5-point win in 2004.
Yet the national swing only tells part of the story. What particularly stands out this year is the breadth of the swing in Trump's direction across not only the 50 states and the District of Columbia, but also an overwhelming majority of the more than 3,000 counties or their equivalents in the United States. Compared with his showing in 2020, Trump didn't pick up a huge amount of ground in many places, but he did gain at least a little bit nearly everywhere. We can see this by drilling into the state-level and county-level data below.
Every state swung to the right in 2024
From one presidential election to the next, more states usually swing toward the party that gains ground compared with how it performed four years earlier. However, it's rare for every state to move in the same direction, even in elections where one candidate wins decisively. After all, changes in the makeup of the party coalitions and the varying appeal of individual candidates can lead different states to move in opposite directions. Plus, at least in a few historical cases, a third-party candidate may have won a meaningful share of the vote that cut more into one party's coalition than another.
But in 2024, all 50 states and D.C. swung to the right to varying degrees based on their margins versus the 2020 race. This marked the first presidential election since 1976 in which all 51 components of the Electoral College moved in the same direction relative to how they voted four years earlier.
Unlike 1976, though, all 50 states and D.C. moved to the right in 2024 even though the previous election was also highly competitive. That wasn't the case in the closely fought 1976 race won by Jimmy Carter: His victory came four years after a landslide result in 1972, when Richard Nixon carried 49 states and won by 23 points nationally — the largest popular vote edge a candidate has earned in the post-World War II era — making 1976's leftward swing more of a return to a highly competitive baseline.
Although six other elections since 1976 featured larger swings than in 2024, at least one state in each of those contests still moved toward the party that lost ground. In 1980, Vermont was the only state where Carter's margin improved even as he lost reelection badly to Ronald Reagan. In 1984, Reagan built significantly on his 1980 margins while winning the only definite landslide since Nixon's 1972 victory, but seven states and D.C. still voted more Democratic than they had four years earlier. Republicans lost ground in 49 states while winning again in 1988, but George H.W. Bush's margin grew very slightly over Reagan's in Tennessee and D.C. When the elder Bush lost reelection in 1992, he did worse in nearly every state, but still managed to improve his margin slightly in Iowa. And when Obama won by the largest margin in recent years in 2008, five now-dark red states trended right (Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Tennessee and West Virginia).
While every state swung to the right in 2024, the extent of that swing did vary quite a bit. Weighted by each state's share of the national popular vote, the average state shifted 5.6 points to the right by margin from its 2020 result. Leading the way was New York, which Harris only won by about 13 points after Biden carried it by 23 points — a swing of more than 10 points. Other populous blue states like New Jersey (10 points) and California (9 points) also swung notably to the right, as did large red states like Florida (10 points) and Texas (8 points).
Conversely, 36 states and D.C. shifted to the right by less than the weighted average. Those states tended to be less populous and therefore more rural, but also include most of the seven principal swing states in the 2024 race, which had the most concentrated campaign attention and spending during the election. Of those, only Arizona had a larger-than-average shift to the right of 5.8 points, while Nevada's 5.5-point rightward shift was about the same as the weighted average. Beyond that, Michigan swung just 4.2 points to the right, and the other four swing states — Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — all swung right by fewer than 3 points.
Of all the states, Washington state had the smallest swing to the right, going from Biden +19 to Harris +18. The Washington outcome serves as yet another reminder that you should never rely on one data point as an indicator of things to come. After all, Washington's blanket and top-two primary results have often served as a decent predictor for the national political environment in the ensuing November election. But in 2024, Democrats running for the U.S. House of Representatives did better in the state's top-two primaries than they performed in 2020 or 2022, yet the November results saw Republicans nationally do much better than in 2020 and similar to their 2022 result in the national popular vote for the House.
Most counties swung right to a small or medium degree
Naturally, as one party gains more compared to the last election, it tends to gain a larger share of voters across the nation's counties, and county-level data can help us understand the depth and breadth of the swing behind an election's outcome. But a simple count of the number of counties that moved in one direction isn't especially helpful in painting this picture. After all, most counties are rural (and consistently conservative-leaning), but rocks and trees can't vote. Carter's 1976 victory was the last time a Democratic presidential nominee won more counties than the Republican did, yet Democrats have won five of the 12 White House contests since then.
To get a read on the scope of county-level swings, it's more useful to consider the share of the nation's overall vote found in counties that moved toward one party or the other. That way, we better account for the vast differences in population across counties. By this measure, the rightward swing of Trump's 2024 victory featured substantial breadth. Compared with the 2020 election, 92 percent of voters lived in counties (or their equivalents) that swung toward Trump, while only 8 percent lived in places that moved toward Harris. The only recent election to rival that span is Obama's 2008 win, when 92 percent of voters lived in counties that swung to the left from the 2004 election.
Now, the depth of Trump's swing was somewhat shallower than Obama's 2008 win, which isn't necessarily surprising considering 2008 saw a bigger overall swing nationally (9.7 points to the left). More than half of all votes in 2008 came from places that swung at least 10 points to the left by margin. By comparison, only 11 percent of 2024 votes hailed from counties that swung more than 10 points to the right, while 81 percent overall came from counties that shifted between zero and 10 points to the right.
Compared to recent contests besides 2008, though, the broad scope of Trump's gains across much of the country seem striking. The third-biggest swing in the past quarter century after 2008 and 2024 came in 2012, when Obama won reelection but the country as a whole swung 3.4 points to the right. Yet even as much of the country swung slightly to the right that year, about 1 in 4 votes still came from counties that moved at least somewhat to the left. In 2020, we saw a similar story: Biden swung the country about 2.4 points to the left from 2016, but a tad more than 1 in 4 votes came from counties that swung right toward Trump.
Another data point further suggests that the shift from 2020 to 2024 was not just broad, but especially consistent in its impacts across the country. Overall, the correlation between each county's margin in 2020 compared with 2024 was .995 on a scale of -1 to 1 — a near-perfect positive association between the two elections, and the strongest between the results in any two consecutive presidential elections dating back to 2000. To be clear, this does not mean that the results were the same in each county in 2020 and 2024. Rather, it broadly means that the more Republican a county voted in 2020, the more Republican it tended to vote in 2024.
Although results in other recent pairs of elections have been highly correlated as well, the 2020-24 comparison is particularly notable because such an incredibly strong association happened even while the country swung 6 points to the right. This suggests that, broadly speaking, this ample national swing did not vary massively across the country. By contrast, the sizable 10-point swing to the left in 2008 from 2004 had a county-level correlation of .933, meaning that while the margins across counties were relatively similar, more places still saw some substantial movement that didn't correspond as closely. And in 2016, which saw particularly large county-level swings from 2012 because of the shifting nature of the Democratic and Republican coalitions at the start of the Trump era, the correlation between the two contests was .945.
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The breadth of the nation's rightward swing could suggest a couple of larger possibilities. Considering 2008 saw the only similarly large national shift in recent times amid financial and global turmoil, the broad swing in 2024 seems to be another point in favor of larger fundamentals-based reasons for the shifts in this election. Dissatisfaction with the economic status quo and immigration, along with high disapproval of the incumbent president, were all clear boons for Trump's candidacy.
At the same time, Trump's gains may have greater resonance moving forward. The relative consistency of the county-level shifts suggests that there weren't major coalition shifts this year, but even minor swings could be a harbinger. Notably, Trump improved most in more urban and more racially diverse places. Odds are that the 2028 election results will be highly correlated with the 2024 results, so even small coalition changes in this election could have a long-term impact on the makeup of the parties and the preferences of voters as we look ahead to future elections.
Footnote
* 2024 data is based on unofficial election results from ABC News as of 12 p.m. Eastern on Dec. 10, 2024.
