The Democrats’ problems run deep, nearly everywhere. This is where voters shifted toward President Trump in each of the last three elections.
And this is where voters shifted toward Democrats.
How Donald Trump Has Remade America’s Political Landscape
Donald J. Trump’s victory in 2024 was not an outlier.
It was the culmination of continuous gains by Republicans in much of the country each time he has run for president, a sea of red that amounts to a flashing warning sign for a Democratic Party out of power and hoping for a comeback.
The steady march to the right at the county level reveals not just the extent of the nation’s transformation in the Trump era but also the degree to which the United States now resembles two countries charging in opposite directions.
Mr. Trump has reordered America’s political divide both geographically and demographically.
Republicans are overwhelmingly making gains in working-class counties.
Democrats are improving almost exclusively in wealthier areas.
It is the same story by education: Republicans are running up the score in counties where fewer people have attended college.
Democrats are gaining ground in a small sliver of the best-educated enclaves.
All told, Mr. Trump has increased the Republican Party’s share of the presidential vote in each election he’s been on the ballot in close to half the counties in America — 1,433 in all — according to an analysis by The New York Times.
It is a staggering political achievement, especially considering that Mr. Trump was defeated in the second of those three races, in 2020.
By contrast, Democrats have steadily expanded their vote share in those three elections in only 57 of the nation’s 3,100-plus counties.
These counties, which we are calling “triple-trending,” offer a unique and invaluable window into how America has realigned — and still is realigning — in the Trump era. They vividly show, in red and blue, the stark changes in the political coalitions of the two parties.
The scale of Mr. Trump’s expanding support is striking. While roughly 8.1 million Americans of voting age live in triple-trending Democratic counties, about 42.7 million live in Republican ones.
Even more ominous for the Democrats are the demographic and economic characteristics of these counties: The party’s sparse areas of growth are concentrated almost exclusively in America’s wealthiest and most educated pockets.
Yet Mr. Trump has steadily gained steam across a broad swath of the nation, with swelling support not just in white working-class communities but also in counties with sizable Black and Hispanic populations.
Counties that have become steadily more Republican exist in some of the country’s bluest strongholds, including New York City, Philadelphia and Honolulu. Mr. Trump’s party is still losing in those places, but by significantly less. At the same time, Mr. Trump has driven Republican margins to dizzying new heights in the nation’s reddest bastions.
Taken together, the findings represent a blaring alarm for a Democratic Party that long saw itself as championing the working class and that staked its future on the belief that the nation would become steadily more diverse and better educated.
To conduct this analysis, The New York Times reviewed the results in every county from the four most recent presidential elections — 2012, to provide a base line, and then the 2016, 2020 and 2024 campaigns, in which Mr. Trump was the Republican nominee — and zoomed in on only those counties where the results grew steadily more Republican or steadily more Democratic.
This distillation reveals the most profound voting and demographic shifts, which can otherwise be obscured by fluctuations in many other counties from one election to the next.
But the sheer scale of Republican gains in the Trump era is significant on its own.
All told, 435 counties voted more Democratic in 2024 than did so in 2012, by an average improved margin of 8.8 percentage points.
And 2,678 counties became more Republican, by an average of 13.3 percentage points. That’s six times as many counties moving toward the G.O.P. than toward the Democratic Party — and by a substantially wider margin.
The erosion of working-class support — among Black, white and Latino voters alike — has unnerved every ideological wing of the Democratic Party.
Ben Tulchin, a pollster who worked on Senator Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaigns, said the old political calculations for how Democrats can win elections were now obsolete.
“The math doesn’t work,” he said. “For years, the belief was Democrats have had demographic destiny on our side. Now, the inverse is true.”
Some Democrats hope that this is only a phenomenon of the Trump era, and that G.O.P. gains will evaporate once the president is no longer on the ballot, as was the case when Democrats fared surprisingly well in the 2022 midterms and in many recent special elections.
But Chris Kofinis, a Democratic strategist who served as chief of staff to former Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who left the party last year, warned that such optimism was misplaced.
“Trump is the symptom, not the disease,” he said. “The disease is the fact that you have lost touch with a whole swath of voters that used to consistently vote Democratic.”
Incomes and education levels explain widening political divides.
The political split by income is among the starkest findings.
Of the 1,433 counties that steadily moved toward Mr. Trump, only three, or just one-fifth of 1 percent, had a median household income above $100,000.
It was the opposite for Democrats: 18 of the 57 counties moving steadily to the left, or nearly a third, had a median household income above $100,000.
Median income, by county
Note: Circle size indicates county population.
The map of the nation’s less prosperous areas tells the same story in reverse.
The median American household income is around $80,000. Places with median incomes lower than that account for 95 percent of counties voting steadily more Republican, but only 25 percent of counties turning steadily more Democratic.
The results were unsurprising to Representative Jared Golden of Maine, whose district is perhaps the most reliably pro-Trump place that has still elected a Democrat to Congress.
“There is a political realignment afoot,” Mr. Golden said in an interview. “We see working-class voters, regardless of where they come from, what their identity is — other than their working-class status — shifting to the Republican Party.”
He blamed a party leadership out of touch with the daily concerns of voters.
“A lot of Democrats talked about the opportunity of broadening the tent,” he said. “But I have not seen that play out in any kind of coherent strategy or actions.”
Equally stark is what could be called a diploma divide.
In not one of the counties where Mr. Trump steadily increased his share of the vote did a majority of adults have a college degree. And in not one of the counties voting more and more Democratic was the college-educated share of the adult population smaller than 20 percent.
People with college or advanced degrees, by county
Note: Circle size indicates county population.
Put another way, only one of the 1,500 counties with the smallest proportion of college graduates voted steadily more Democratic over the last three elections. Republicans steadily grew their vote share in more than two-thirds of those less-educated counties.
The erosion of the Democratic base is accelerating.
Black voters have been — and still are — the most reliable Democratic voters. But in his three presidential campaigns, Mr. Trump made serious inroads in heavily Black counties, across the Deep South and beyond.
Those incursions predated 2024: More counties with a majority of Black voters shifted toward the Republicans in each of the last three elections (58) than the total number of counties nationwide that trended toward Democrats (57).
Democrats increased their share of the vote in all three elections in only two majority-Black counties in the entire country, Rockdale and Douglas, both outside Atlanta in Georgia, a hotly contested battleground state.
Percentage of Black population, by county
Note: Circle size indicates county population.
Measuring electoral performance by race using countywide results is imprecise; voters of any race could play a role in a partisan shift. But all signs point toward the same conclusion, including the fact that Mr. Trump’s support continued to grow in each of the six most predominantly Black counties in the country.
In last year’s election, Republicans gained ground in 193 of the country’s 200 most predominantly Black counties — even as former Vice President Kamala Harris stood to become the first Black female president.
The slippage is even more pronounced and profound in Latino communities.
Percentage of Hispanic population, by county
Note: Circle size indicates county population.
Of the 67 counties in America with a majority Hispanic population, 66 voted more Republican in 2024 than in 2012.
Even more arresting is that the average swing toward the G.O.P. in those 66 Hispanic-majority counties was 23 percentage points — a political earthquake with which both parties are still coming to terms.
Mr. Trump improved his results in each of his three presidential runs in about two-thirds of majority-Hispanic counties.
Democrats, by contrast, steadily improved their share of the vote in not a single county in America where Latinos account for a third or more of the population.
Democratic strongholds are increasingly islands.
If a broad and increasingly diverse swath of the country has realigned toward the Republican Party, only a few isolated areas have moved sharply in the Democrats’ direction.
Triple-trending counties that shifted furthest to the left from 2012 to 2024
| County | 2012 result | 2024 result | Shift size |
|---|---|---|---|
| Henry, Ga. | R+3 | D+30 | D+33 |
| Rockdale, Ga. | D+17 | D+48 | D+31 |
| Forsyth, Ga. | R+63 | R+33 | D+30 |
| Hamilton, Ind. | R+34 | R+6 | D+28 |
| Fayette, Ga. | R+31 | R+3 | D+28 |
| Douglas, Ga. | D+4 | D+31 | D+28 |
| Cobb, Ga. | R+12 | D+15 | D+27 |
| Los Alamos, N.M. | D+4 | D+30 | D+27 |
| Johnson, Kan. | R+17 | D+8 | D+26 |
| Broomfield, Colo. | D+6 | D+29 | D+23 |
Just nine counties voted more Democratic in each of the presidential elections since 2012 and shifted by a total of more than 25 percentage points.
Six of those nine counties surround Atlanta.
The other three are upscale suburbs of Indianapolis and Kansas City, and the postage-stamp-size county in New Mexico that houses the Los Alamos National Laboratory, an outpost of highly educated and highly paid workers.
On the other hand, 535 counties shifted toward the Republicans in all three presidential elections and by a total of at least 25 percentage points. They were spread across 36 states, from diverse Democratic strongholds like the Bronx in New York City, where the Black and Latino population tops 80 percent, to overwhelmingly white and rural counties.
Triple-trending counties that shifted furthest to the right from 2012 to 2024
| County | 2012 result | 2024 result | Shift size |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starr, Texas | D+73 | R+16 | R+89 |
| Maverick, Texas | D+58 | R+18 | R+77 |
| Zapata, Texas | D+43 | R+22 | R+66 |
| Elliott, Ky. | D+3 | R+62 | R+64 |
| Duval, Texas | D+54 | R+10 | R+64 |
| Webb, Texas | D+54 | R+2 | R+56 |
| Pike, Ohio | R+0 | R+54 | R+54 |
| Reeves, Texas | D+16 | R+37 | R+53 |
| Zavala, Texas | D+68 | D+14 | R+53 |
| Howard, Iowa | D+21 | R+32 | R+53 |
Some Democrats have taken comfort from how narrowly Mr. Trump won the popular vote in 2024, or from how closely the battleground states were contested, or from the expectation that the voters who will turn out in the 2026 midterms — who tend to be wealthier and more educated — will lean Democratic.
But many others worry about the future of a party that is hemorrhaging vital support from what were once among its most rock-solid constituencies.
“The majority of Americans now believe that the Republican Party best represents the interests of the working class and the poor, the Democratic Party is the party of the wealthy and the elites,” lamented Ken Martin, who took over as chairman of the Democratic National Committee this year.
Reversing that view, he said in an interview, was one of his top priorities.
Texas and New York tell the tale.
The story of the country’s political trajectory can be told through a closer look at two of America’s biggest states, one red and one blue: Texas and New York.
In Texas, Mr. Trump made successive gains in 124 of its 254 counties, from rural, nearly all-white places to diverse counties along the southern border where he achieved many of his greatest increases in vote share in the entire country.
Where voters consecutively shifted in one direction in the last three elections
Of Texas’ 126 counties that shifted consecutively in one direction over the last three elections, only two shifted to the left.
The biggest swing in the nation since 2012, moving 89 percentage points in Mr. Trump’s favor, occurred in Starr County, which includes Rio Grande City and borders Mexico. It is also the nation’s most predominantly Latino county, with a 96 percent Hispanic voting-age population.
All told, Mr. Trump steadily improved his vote share over the three campaigns by more than 50 percentage points in seven heavily Hispanic counties in South Texas.
The parts of the state where Democrats most improved in the Trump era are concentrated in wealthy, well-educated suburbs. Four of the five counties where Democrats gained the most ground in 2024 compared with 2012 were outside Dallas, including the only Texas county that steadily voted more Democratic over that time, Ellis County.
“This may sound crazy to you: Maybe this had to happen for the Democratic Party to wake up and stop taking people for granted based on the color of their skin, or their country of national origin, or where they live in the state,” said Beto O’Rourke, the former congressman who has run unsuccessfully for president and for the Senate. “If we don’t do that, we will continue to lose.”
Where voters consecutively shifted in one direction in the last three elections in New York
The results were echoed in New York, where 43 of the state’s 62 counties voted more Republican by at least 10 percentage points in 2024 compared with in 2012. The overall margin of victory for Democrats statewide was slashed in half.
The lone New York county to trend continuously toward the Democrats was Tompkins County, home to Ithaca, an overwhelmingly progressive university town where nearly 60 percent of residents have a college degree.
Yet counties that have shifted three times toward Mr. Trump include not only far-upstate counties, like St. Lawrence and Lewis, with vanishingly small nonwhite populations, but also some of the nation’s most diverse areas, like the Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn.
“We could be entering a world where the greatest predictor of voting behavior is no longer race,” said Representative Ritchie Torres, a Democrat from the Bronx. “Donald Trump’s greatest achievement — his greatest electoral achievement — lies not in breaking the blue wall in the industrial Midwest, but in beginning to break the blue walls in states like New York, and in counties like the Bronx.”
Yet Mr. Torres is not yet ready to predict his party’s doom.
“I am convinced that Donald Trump is a singular phenomenon in American history,” he said. “I am unconvinced that his appeal is necessarily transferable to the Republican Party writ large. That remains to be seen.”
Sources and methodology
Election results at the county- and county-equivalent level for 2024 are compiled by the Associated Press. For historical results, The Times used Dave Leip’s Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections.
The Times analysis includes 3,114 of the 3,143 counties in the country. The differences are due to the fact Connecticut began to use planning regions instead of counties starting in 2024; for comparability, The Times aggregated historical county-level results into planning regions. Additionally, results for Alaska are not available at the county level, and results for Kalawao County, Hawaii, are not available. For analytical purposes, The Times treated Alaska as a county equivalent and used statewide data.
Income and education data are from the 2019-23 American Community Survey. Race and ethnicity data, as well as data on the total number of voting-age Americans, are from the U.S. Census Bureau’s estimates of “citizen voting-age population,” a special tabulation of the American Community Survey.
When citing average shifts in percentage point shifts across counties, The Times weighted by county population.