President-elect Donald Trump’s surprising victory on Nov. 8 stemmed from massive surge in Republican voters throughout the Rust Belt.
A TIME analysis of county-level results show stunning shifts in Trump’s favor through the upper Midwest and Northeast, demonstrating the success of his trade and economic message in the nation’s heartland. Meanwhile former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton took advantage of Trump’s weakness with traditional Republicans to make gains largely in urban coastal centers.
The one exception: the mountain states, where growing Hispanic populations and Mormon distaste for Trump provided some of the sharpest swings for the Democrats.
Of the 3,112 counties for which there is county-level data, 2,728 shifted toward the GOP, 383 shifted Democratic, and 1—Barrow County, Georgia—stayed exactly the same.
The counties where Clinton gained on Obama occurred in much larger counties, where a median of 75,554 people showed up to vote in 2016. The median for the 2,728 Republican-gaining counties is 9,905.
Shifts in partisan preference do not necessarily mean the county swapped its overall support from one party to the other. While Trump received considerably less support than Mitt Romney in Utah, for example, he still managed to win 27 of 29 counties in the reliably Republican state.
Overall, he won 2,622 predominantly small counties while Clinton won 490, most of which were much more populous. (Those figures may shift very slightly since some states take a long time to certify their results.) Still, the shifts were large enough for a number of pickups. At present count, Trump snagged 220 counties that voted for President Obama in 2012, while Clinton poached 17 that went for Mitt Romney.
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