Massive Shift in Urban Voting Helped Elect Trump

You can’t point to just one reason Trump won such a decisive victory last Tuesday, but you can identify a few factors together that guaranteed that Trump would win the popular vote. 

Among those, the rightward shift of urban voters who form the base of the Democratic Party is at the top of the list.

The Trump campaign put cracks in Democrats’ dominance of big cities. Its outreach to these voters clearly marks a path for repeatable political success in cities nationwide. https://t.co/HaD7fVMI5v via @reihan & @CharlesFLehman

— City Journal (@CityJournal) November 13, 2024

Trump saw gains nearly everywhere, but urban areas stand out because, without massive turnout in the big cities, Democrats can kiss their electoral prospects goodbye. 

Big cities are where the elite tend to congregate, and the Democrat coalition has recently been characterized by an odd alliance between wealthy, overeducated and irrationally leftist elites and working-class minorities. Throw in public employee unions and Democrats could count on huge turnout in urban areas. 

The turnout, while still large, is not quite so massive anymore as America’s cities face a crisis in governance. 

Trump most overperformed in large metro counties, according to analyst Jed Kolko. Compared with his run against Joe Biden, Trump ran 9 points closer to Kamala Harris in such areas—a bigger gain than he saw in suburbs, college towns, or military posts.

It wasn’t just a few cities, either. Trump improved on his 2020 performance in cities as diverse as Chicago, Detroit, and Dallas. He won Miami-Dade County outright. He got the closest margin for a Republican in New York City in 30 years. He won a precinct in lower Manhattan; one south Philadelphia neighborhood voted for him by almost three to one.

These swings are partly a byproduct of the surprising diversity of the Trump coalition, which exit polling suggests may have included a fifth of black men and a majority of Latino men. In New York City, Trump ran up votes not just on Staten Island, but in hyper-diverse Queens and South Brooklyn.

Trump has been chipping away at the Democratic Party coalition since 2015, but it was in 2024 that he at least temporarily broke the ties between non-progressive middle-class workers and the Democrats. Even more than in the suburbs, exurban areas, and the vast rural areas of America, voters in progressive-led cities faced the reality that Democrats suck at governing. 

The thing is that this has all been obvious for some time and the general position of many pundits and much of the press has been to dismiss this reality.

Not just in cities. Democrats have done a terrible job at governing at every levels and voters noticed. https://t.co/N5Tc9BZ0z4

— AG (@AGHamilton29) November 14, 2024

The old Democratic Party coalition at least threw bones to the working class as well as throwing out scary hoaxes about Republicans. They governed, if not competently, to a minimum standard that people were willing to tolerate. 

Progressives, though, ruin everything they touch, and Trump’s anti-establishment pitch appealed because voters could no longer tolerate the establishment that has been destroying where they live. 

At the same time, the Left yet again needs to learn to check its worst impulses. Even voters in deep-blue California resoundingly rejected progressive policies, voting out four far-left prosecutors and mayors, and undoing a controversial soft-on-crime bill from a decade ago. If Democrats can’t commit themselves to common sense, voters will continue to punish them for it at the ballot box.

These lessons apply at the national level, but they are just as important—if not more so—locally. For decades, Republicans have spurned urban America as not worth their time. As a result, many of America’s once-great cities have languished under unaccountable, kleptocratic rule by far-left Democrats who care more about lining the pockets of public-sector unions than about citizens’ well-being.

Urban voters across the country are looking for something different. The right leader—Republican or Democrat—could give them the sane, smart policies they’re looking for. From Queens to Miami, in white and black and Latino and Asian neighborhoods alike, the verdict of a growing chorus of urbanites is clear: they want their cities to be great again.

It took the breakdown of liberal governance to wake up to the hellscape that leftists have been striving to create. Prior to the COVID lockdowns, the tolerance of riots, and the breakdown of all forms of public order that were the product of leftist governance, liberal city-dwellers just accepted the claims that Democrats made that Republicans were intolerant, fascistic, and “phobic.” 

The years of progressive political success laid the groundwork for the collapse of progressive politics in 2024. With cities like Oakland, San Francisco, Portland, Chicago, and Los Angeles collapsing under the weight of progressive policies, enough voters woke up to the dangers of “woke” that Trump saw massive gains in the popular vote in Deep Blue cities. 

It’s a shame that it took the near-collapse of public order, public finances, and the education system to break the spell that progressives cast on voters, but better late than never. Leftists are being voted out of office, and voters are ready to give the alternative a try. 

Will the cracks in the Democratic coalition endure? I suspect they will for a while at least. Trump is a unique figure, but he is reshaping the Republican Party and promises to smash the worst of the federal government. And because the federal government has poured hundreds of billions of dollars into failed urban policies that will be squeezed soon enough, voters may like what they see. 

Let’s hope so.