Compared to past elections such as 2012, Donald Trump did better with the New, Weird America, while Kamala did better than Obama in 2012 in old-fashioned WASP strongholds.
On Twitter, a Cornell law student named Siddharth Khurana (@SidKhurana3607) with an interest in demographics has been posting presidential winning margins from 2012 (Romney-Obama), 2016 (Trump-Hillary), 2020 (Trump-Biden), and 2024 (Trump-Kamala).
He’s got a knack for picking out interesting districts to focus upon. Is that cherrypicking? Kind of, but it can help make some overall patterns vivid.
As I pointed out in my recent post on Jewish voting in 2024, exit polls sound promising for determining how small groups vote, but they run into sample size problems. So, a complement is to analyze geographic areas (counties, towns, Congressional districts, precincts, etc.) where the Census tells us there are particular concentrations of an ethnicity of other type of group.
For example, there are small numbers of Armenians in quite a few places across the country, but Glendale, CA, a nice suburb of Los Angeles is the only place that’s 40% Armenian. So how Glendale trends might stand in pretty well for Armenians in general.
Then again, Armenians in Glendale might vote notably different from Armenians in, say, Santa Monica, who probably tend to talk to other Armenians less than do Armenians in Glendale. Or it could be that whomever makes up the other 60% of Glendale is trending strongly in a different direction from Glendale’s Armenians.
But most of the time, precinct analysis works pretty well to give you sense of the general direction that an ethnicity is moving.
So, one thing Khurana does is look up outlier locales in terms of the highest percentage of a particular ethnic group. He also points out places with the biggest changes in electoral margins over time to encourage speculation about the demographic correlates. Third, he looks at places that are amusingly weird.
A common theme is that Trump in 2024 did much better than Romney did in 2012 in the weirder places in America, like the Maharishi Vedic City in Iowa, which was founded by the Beatles’ guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in 2001:
Maharishi Vedic City, Iowa (pop. 277):
2012: D+15 2016: D+3 2020: D+2 2024: R+10
The Maharishi’s followers in this Iowa town are 83% white.
White Bread America
Obviously, the more Anglo-Protestant a place, the less white bread its supermarkets sell these days, but that old pejorative still is in use.
In contrast to Maharishiville, there’s Gosnold, MA, a town on islands near Martha’s Vineyard that is so WASP white bread that it’s kind of weird in 2024:
Gosnold, MA (pop. 70, 100% white, 75% college-ed):
43% English ancestry as well, which is quite high
2012: D+15 2016: D+13 2020: D+42 2024: D+54
Grand Rapids, Michigan, home of President Gerald Ford, used to be the embodiment of rock-ribbed Republican normalcy, but is now closer to a toss-up:
Here, we have the Grand Rapids-Wyoming-Kentwood metro (four MI counties, pop. 1.15M).
Was once the state's most Republican area, but has been shifting left and barely moved even as Trump flipped MI.
2012: R+15 2016: R+14 2020: R+6 2024: R+7
Tompkins County in the beautiful Finger Lakes region of upstate New York is centered around Cornell University in Ithaca.
Unlike the rest of New York, Tompkins County did not move to the right, with Harris getting 73% of the vote. Harris' best municipality was the city of Ithaca at 87%. Trump's lone victory was Groton, where he got 53%.
Kamala did better in Tompkins County 73% than in The Bronx (72%).
Here’s all the metro areas where Kamala did better than Biden:
Here's a full list of all the metros that swung left in 2024
Only 23 out of the 380+ metros did so, most were pretty marginal but Grand Junction, CO was #1
These are pretty white bread places in general.
Trending blue:
Darien, Connecticut (85% white, 83% college-ed, 232K median income):
2012: R+31 2016: D+12 2020: D+23 2024: D+19
Most of the Tri-State Area (Darien is 43 miles from Times Square) seems to kind of like Trump, but Darien is so classy it finds him appalling.
You might think that after the 2020 summer-long antifa riots in Portland, that it would have wised up, but it looks to have doubled down:
Pretty sure that Portland, OR (#27 in the US at 653K) was the largest city to get more Dem in 2024:
2016: D+65.3 2020: D+70.5 2024: D+71.3
Here’s a town with a lot of physicists:
White Rock, New Mexico (Los Alamos suburb, pop. 6K):
2012: R+9 2016: D+7 2020: D+14 2024: D+22
White + college-educated + high median income: for the most part, Kamala's biggest improvements over Biden and past Dem nominees
Graduate degrees?
How the top counties by grad degree % voted, 2020 → 2024:
Falls Church, VA (48%): D+64 → D+62 Los Alamos, NM (42%): D+27 → D+30 Arlington, VA (41%): D+64 → D+60 Washington, DC (37%): D+87 → D+84
One of the few groups Harris held up relatively well with: rightward swings were pretty small and Los Alamos even swung left.
Here a couple of Denver suburbs:
Columbine, Colorado (Trump-Harris flip):
2012: R+16 2016: R+11 2020: R+2 2024: D+1
Arvada, CO (Denver suburb, pop. 124K):
2012: D+4 2016: D+3 2020: D+15 2024: D+18
Kamala did pretty well in the suburbs:
Elm Grove, WI (92% white Milwaukee suburb):
2012: R+36 2016: R+14 2020: R+3 2024: D+1
Walter White's precinct in Albuquerque, New Mexico:
2012: R+11 2016: D+2 2020: D+5 2024: D+4
Wealthy country club whites:
George W. Bush's precinct in Preston Hollow, Dallas:
2012: R+45 2016: R+13 2020: R+4 2024: R+6
Ted Cruz's home precinct in River Oaks (one of the richest and whitest neighborhoods in Houston):
2012: R+37 2016: R+1 2020: D+4 2024: D+4
Grosse Pointe Farms, Michigan (90% white Detroit suburb):
2012: R+29 2016: R+13 2020: R+0.1 2024: D+0.5
White Ethnics
I’ll put the paywall here before looking at examples of White Ethnics (e.g. Italians, French Canadians), Hispanics, Asians, Blacks, Pacific Islanders, reservation Indians, and Middle Easterners.
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