Weak turnout in key cities hurt Harris in the 'blue wall' states
A new analysis of precinct-level data by the NBC News Decision Desk shows the extent to which President-elect Donald Trump’s wins in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania — and Vice President Kamala Harris’s losses — were driven by weak turnout in heavily Democratic cities.
A new analysis of precinct-level data by the NBC News Decision Desk shows the extent to which President-elect Donald Trump’s wins in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania — and Vice President Kamala Harris’s losses — were driven by weak turnout in heavily Democratic cities.
Going into Election Day, Harris’s clearest path to victory was to win all three states in the old “blue wall.” Ultimately, she fell short in all three, and the nearly completed vote count in those states shows how the number of votes compared to 2020 dropped in some of the most Democratic-friendly areas of those states.
The charts below show the relationship between Harris’ share of the vote and the percent change in the total number of votes cast in the presidential race compared to the total vote in 2020. Each dot represents a county, and dots that are above the 0% line are counties with more voters in 2024 than 2020; the relatively few dots below that line are counties with fewer voters in 2024 compared to 2020.
NBC News Decision DeskAs the diagonal black lines show, in all three states, heavily Democratic counties on the right side of each panel had worse turnout relative to 2020 than the heavily Republican counties on the left side. The largest county in each state — Wayne County, Michigan, home of Detroit; Philadelphia County, Pennsylvania; and Milwaukee County, Wisconsin — had either the worst or second-worst shift in votes cast of any county in their state.
These three underperforming counties and their cities fueled the Democratic electoral success in the 2020 and 2022 elections. Although Harris comfortably won all three of these cities by over 50 percentage points each, she received a slightly lower percentage of the vote than Joe Biden did in 2020. More consequential, however, was the stagnant or shrinking turnout in these cities, which — coupled with turnout growth in Republican counties across the blue wall — drove Trump’s victory.
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