The 2024 Presidential Election and U.S. Regional Cultures
The 2024 elections ensured an authoritarian, coup-plotting convicted felon will spend the coming years in the Oval Office. It will be the work of a generation to rebuild American democracy from the damage.
Given the stakes, it’s disorienting that the election results were so pedestrian. No historic realignment of our political geography, sweeping mandate, or surge of authoritarian enthusiasm was recorded in the exit polls. Democracy was on the ballot, but many voters made the election about the price of eggs.
From a regional point of view—and that’s a big part of what I study—2024, in many ways, doesn’t look much different from the 2000 election. A quarter century of drama and upheaval—hanging chads, falling towers, forever wars, failing banks, deadly variants—and most of the country’s regional cultures have barely budged their partisan leanings. In most regions, this was Donald Trump’s best election yet, but his ethnonationalist agenda still underperformed George W. Bush’s corporate neo-conservatism, albeit during wartime.
As I laid out in my 2011 book American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, our sectional differences and their boundaries can be traced to the rival colonizing projects that took hold on the eastern and southwestern rims of what is now the U.S. in the 17th and 18th centuries. These rival projects settled mutually exclusive strips of much of the continent, laying down cultural norms and attitudes toward authority, honor, diversity, government, individual liberty, communitarianism, identity, and belonging. These have shaped our history, our constitutional structure, and, of course, electoral politics—past and present. (I have frequently written about its political implications in the Monthly over the past 14 years, but there’s a detailed summary here.) The regions do not respect state or even international boundaries, as you can see from the map at the top of this post of what they look like today. They profoundly affect our politics, as I’ve previously demonstrated regarding the 2020, 2016, and 2012 presidential contests, the 2022, 2018, and 2014 midterms, and even key off-year contests discussed in the Monthly in 2013 and 2011.
At Nationhood Lab—the project I founded at Salve Regina University’s Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy—we crunched the 2024 presidential election results before the holidays. From my perspective, the topline result echoed the same regional patterning we’ve seen in virtually all competitive contests in our history, including the elections of the past quarter century. In recent decades, what have been “blue” regions voted for Harris. The “red” regions went 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 a 0.5 percent victory this time around. In the other regions, the winning candidate’s margin of victory was between six and 34 percent, from Harris’s comfortable victory in Yankeedom to her blowout in the Left Coast.
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 mainly 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 most considerable improvements were in three ethnographically diverse, communitarian-minded regions: New Netherland, El Norte, and Spanish Caribbean. Each moved over ten points in his direction since 2016.
But if you step back, Trump’s surge looks less impressive. We crunched the numbers for presidential elections from George W Bush’s hair’s breadth victory over Al Gore in 2000 to Biden’s narrow win four years ago—to better understand how the three “Trump elections” fit into regional partisan trend lines. Is Trumpism—an ethnonational authoritarian movement—more popular than the conventional “less taxes, less regulation” conservatism of George W. Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney? Does Harris 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 questions looks to be mostly “No,” as shown in this graphic.
Trump’s 2024 margins are worse in many regional cultures than Bush’s in 2004. The Texan did better than Trump in the Deep South, Far West, El Norte, Tidewater, Left Coast, and Greater Polynesia. Romney bested him in the Far West in 2012, and both Romney and John McCain outperformed him in Tidewater, although 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 the same as Barack Obama’s, though a few points less than Biden’s and Clinton’s.
True to history, 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. Biden’s margin of victory in 2020 (+3.1) was about the same as Gore’s two decades earlier (+2.8.) Obama did better than anyone here. Still, 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 compared to 2016. This takes Florida—where the other 62 percent of the population lives in the 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. 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 H.W. Bush handily won every county in the enclave. Trump has also made consistent inroads in another region with a large Latino population and cultural legacy, El Norte, where he reduced the Democratic candidate’s lead from 21.8 points in 2016 to 20.8 in 2020 to 11.6 this year.
There’s more analysis—including a discussion of rural-urban trends and the Trumpian strength in New Netherland (also touched on by Nate Weisberg here)—in our piece at Nationhood Lab.
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