America’s regional cultures followed their usual pattern, but there with big shifts in El Norte and Spanish Caribbean
By Colin Woodard
At Nationhood Lab we’ve been receiving a lot of inquiries about when we’ll be posting an American Nations-driven analysis of the 2024 election. The answer has been: “when California and some other states finally finish counting most of their ballots.” This is because in 2016 and 2020 I learned that, from an American Nations perspective, the numbers tend to change in small but significant ways from where they were a week out from the election. At last, the data is in, and we’re kicking off our analysis with the most consequential race, the presidency. (If you’re unfamiliar with the American Nations model, we explain it here.)
The topline result is the least surprising one: the 2024 presidential election results exhibited the same regional patterning we’ve seen in virtually all competitive contests in our history, including all the elections of the past quarter century. What have, in recent decades, been “blue” regions voted for Democratic nominee Kamala Harris, the “red” regions for Donald Trump, and the great swing region, the Midlands, was, once again, the only regional culture that was truly competitive, with Trump eking out an 0.5 percent victory. In the other regions, the winning candidate’s margin of victory was between six and thirty-four percent, from Harris’s comfortable victory in Yankeedom to her blowout in the Left Coast. Despite the stark choice on at the top of the ballot – where one of the candidates was a convicted felon and adjudicated rapist facing dozens of indictments for his role in leading a violent coup to overthrow the republic four years ago — this was a close election decided at the margins.
Beneath the surface were some significant developments. Most striking is that Trump improved on his 2020 performance in every region, both the nine major ones that are located primarily within the current borders of the United States and three of the smaller “enclaves” that are the U.S. portions of regional cultures that are primarily located in Canada, the Caribbean, Greenland or Oceania. (Because Alaska doesn’t report results on a county level, it’s been excluded from this analysis, which means we don’t have data here for the fourth “enclave” region, First Nation.) In all but one of those regions, 2024 was his best performance to date, improving even on his 2016 numbers, and his biggest improvements were in three ethnographically diverse, communitarian-minded regions: New Netherland, El Norte, and Spanish Caribbean, each of which have moved more than ten points in his direction since 2016.
If you take a step back, Trump’s surge looks less impressive. We crunched the numbers for every presidential election of the past quarter century — from George W Bush’s hair’s breadth victory over Al Gore in 2000 to Biden’s narrow win four years ago – to get a better sense of how the three “Trump elections” fit into regional partisan trend lines. Is Trumpism – an ethnonational authoritarian movement – truly more popular than the conventional “less taxes, less regulation” conservatism of George W. Bush, John McCain and Mitt Romney? Does Kamala Harris really represent a less popular vision of liberal politics than conventional Democratic politicians like Al Gore, John Kerry, or Hillary Clinton? Using a regional culture lens, the answer to both of these questions looks to be “mostly no.”
In many of the regional cultures, Trump’s 2024 margins are worse than George W. Bush’s. During his 2004 reelection campaign, Bush did better than Trump in the Deep South, Far West, El Norte, Tidewater, Left Coast and Greater Polynesia. Mitt Romney bested him in the Far West in 2012 and both Romney and John McCain outperformed him in Tidewater, though that region has been rapidly trending blue over the past decade. Harris’s margins in El Norte, Left Coast and Greater Polynesia were substantially better than Al Gore’s were in 2000 or John Kerry’s in 2004, and her numbers in Left Coast were almost exactly the same as Barack Obama’s, though a few points less than Biden’s and Clinton’s.
The Midlands has behaved as a swing region throughout this period. Trump won it by half a point this year, falling just short of Hillary Clinton’s 0.6-point margin in 2016, but better than Bush’s 0.1-point margin of victory in 2004. Joe Biden’s margin of victory in 2020 (+3.1) was about the same as Al Gore’s two decades earlier (+2.8.) Obama did better than anyone here, but his margin in 2008 (+10.5) is the only time a candidate has had a solid victory win here since the Reagan era.
But Trump has a strong track record in other parts of the federation. Last month he flipped Spanish Caribbean – that’s South Florida, where Mar-a-Lago is located – for the first time this millennium, realizing a nearly 22-point swing in comparison to 2016. This takes Florida – where the other 62% of the population lives in Deep South – off the board for Democrats in much the same way as the conservative shift of the Cajun-Bourbon enclave of New France made Louisiana a red state. In fact, Trump’s margin of victory this year in Spanish Caribbean (+7.7) was greater than his margin in the Deep South (as a whole) four years ago (+7). The conservative, pro-business, anti-communist culture of this enclave’s Cuban community, now augmented by Venezuelan exiles, appears to have restored its dominance over the area for the first time since the 1980s, when Reagan and George HW Bush handily won every county in the enclave.
Trump has also made consistent inroads in El Norte, reducing the Democratic lead from 21.8 points in 2016 to 20.8 in 2020 to 11.6 this year. I’ve always described El Norte as a swing region because the underlying Norteño Mexican culture emphasizes faith, family, entrepreneurship, and tradition – a perfect fit for a center-right party. Democrats have nonetheless been winning this fast-growing region by large margins because, over the past two decades, the Republican Party has increasingly embraced a less inclusive definition of the country.
But despite his ethnonationalism, Trump has been making significant gains in rural El Norte, where people of Mexican descent are the overwhelming majority. Back in 2016, Clinton won those rural counties by a point in 2016, and Obama won them by 9.4 in 2008. But in 2020, Trump won them by just over 10, and this year by a whopping 19.7, a whopping 20.7-point swing.
The damage to Democrats has been concentrated in South Texas, including the Lower Rio Grande Valley, where Spanish is the mother language of a supermajority of the population, and has been since Europeans first colonized it more than three centuries ago. In 2020, one rural county in the Valley – Zapata – flipped red for the first time in a century. This year almost every county in the heretofore Democratic stronghold flipped, from the urbanized counties where Brownsville, McAllen, Harlingen, and Laredo are located to tiny Willacy and Duval, with less than 10,000 votes between them. A decade ago, Democrats were confident they would flip Texas by now on the growing size of the state’s Hispanic community, effectively banishing Republicans from the White House. Trump’s unexpected strength in a community has made that a pipe dream. Texas-based reporter Jack Herrera has interviewed many Tejanos on why this shift happened, with the summary argument coming from Republican Rep. Monica De La Cruz, who won reelection last month. “The Republican Party has now become the working man’s party,” she told him. “It’s the party for those who want a strong economy, the opportunity for prosperity.”
Trump has also made clear gains in his native New Netherland, though this is of less Electoral College consequence. People in greater New York City are well aware of Trump’s business scandals and his brand of intolerant ethno-chauvinism is anathema to this multicultural, pluralistic culture, and he lost here by more than 16 points. But Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton beat him by 30 in their respective races, a margin Obama and Gore matched against Bush, McCain, and Romney in 2000, 2008 and 2012. Indeed, Trump’s margin is the best any Republican has had in the region in decades. Some of his biggest gains were in immigrant-heavy city boroughs of Queens and the Bronx, and reporting from the region has suggested economic issues drove the shift here too. “The frustrations of Latino voters, and may I add Asian voters and even perhaps some Black voters, is the Democratic Party’s inability to deliver on bread-and-butter issues,” state senator and mayoral candidate Jessica Ramos, a Democrat from Queens told Politico. “They feel like they work and work and work and it doesn’t really bear fruit. They came to this country to buy a house and provide for their families and well, that’s getting harder every year.”
(A quick note for the researchers among you: the American Nations numbers for past elections reported here are slightly different than reported in some of my prior election analysis. This is because those pieces were written much closer to election day using incomplete count, while this post draws from the completed results (for 2000 to 2020) and the virtually final results as posted by the New York Times at midday on December 3, 2024.)
Rural vs Urban
Conventional analysis of 21st century U.S. politics has held that the central rift in U.S. politics is rural versus urban America. Though that has been demonstrably untrue for most of this century, Trump and Trumpism has started to change that by attracting large numbers of rural voters to their banners.
Rural and urban places obviously have different interests, and political divides between city and countryside exist in every nation from France to India, but I’ve long argued that their predictive power is greatly exaggerated. In 2008 and 2012, for instance, Obama won scores of rural, white, poor counties across Yankeedom, including nearly every rural county in New England. In 2012, Mitt Romney won lots of central cities in Greater Appalachia, the Deep South, and Far West, including Phoenix, Jacksonville, Knoxville, Mobile, Salt Lake City, and Oklahoma City. Indeed, the pattern has been that within most regional cultures, voters in rural and urban counties vote for the same candidate. Thus, rural Yankees voted for Obama by nearly six points in 2008, while rural El Norte residents went for Gore in 2000, Obama in 2008 and 2012, and Hillary Clinton (by 1) in 2016. Voters in urban counites in the Deep South, Greater Appalachia, and Far have voted for Republican nominees in every election this century. And we saw this county group fidelity to regional cultures, regardless of their ruralness or urbanity, in many of statewide races we analyzed after the 2022 midterms.
There’s no doubt, however, that Trumpism, with its implicit ethno-nationalist orientation that privileges white Christian Americans over Americans who are not one of those things, has proven more popular in rural places than the more diverse urban and suburban ones, opening up a rural-urban gulf that didn’t exist outside the Midlands (which for some reason has long been polarized in this way.) That trend continued this November, when Trump met or made new records for rural victory margins in nine of the eleven regions that have rural counties in them. In rural Yankeedom – which Obama won by 5.9 sixteen years ago – Trump beat Harris by a whopping 19.3 points. In the rural Midlands, which George W Bush won by 21 in 2000, Trump’s margin of victory was 44.6, four points higher than in 2016. His margin in rural Greater Appalachian counties, his margin was a staggering 55.6 points, triple that of Bush back in 2000. He won the rural Deep Southern counties by 34.6, more than double Mitt Romney’s 2012 margin and more than triple Bush’s in 2000.
But, as this year’s downballot results indicate, Trumpism is brittle without Trump himself, a topic we’ll be delving into in our next election post.
Thanks to our partners at Motivf, Tova Perlman (for her electoral data wrangling) and John Liberty (for the maps and graphics herein.)
— Colin Woodard is the director of Nationhood Lab at Salve Regina University’s Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy.