Why is Donald Trump winning? 3 key factors that explain his swing state wins.

Although votes are still being counted and more battleground states have yet to be called, we can see a handful of trends developing in the 2024 election. Former President Donald Trump is showing again that he can turn already ruby ​​red parts of the country even more Republican. And in the suburbs, where Democrats have made gains throughout the Trump era, those gains seem inconsistent at best this time around.

Meanwhile, while it’s still too early to say for sure, Trump appears to have made major inroads with voters of color, particularly in Latino communities.

Exit polls, the main way commentators and reporters try to understand the electoral trends happening nationally, are notoriously unreliable and will take weeks or months to paint a full picture. But here are some trends that look clear so far.

Trump has been able to maximize his support in rural areas

Everyone expected Trump to dominate in rural areas. What was not clear, however, was whether he could improve on the already large margins by which he won in 2020.

Yet it seems he has. Early in the night, Trump built large cushions of support in Indiana, Kentucky, Georgia and North Carolina. That trend continued throughout the night. In rural areas across Pennsylvania, for example, the general trend when the votes were counted was that Trump was able to both increase turnout and increase his margin of support in the GOP heartland.

One obvious example of this rural increase: Lackawanna County, home to President Joe Biden’s hometown of Scranton, swung 5.6 points to the right from 2020 — though Kamala Harris still looked set to win the county by the slimmest of margins.

The suburban shift towards Democrats stalled

To offset the expected GOP margins of support in rural areas, Democrats have had to rely not only on winning urban centers, but getting a boost in the surrounding suburbs. These suburbs have been trending toward Democrats since 2016 — but it’s not clear today that this leftward wobble has continued.

The first clear sign of trouble in the suburbs came in northern Virginia’s Loudoun County, a suburb of Washington, DC with a large concentration of college-educated voters. Joe Biden won it by about 25 points in 2020; this year, Harris appears to have won it by only about 17 points.

In Indiana’s Hamilton County, seen as perhaps an early indicator of other trends because of its Indianapolis suburbs, Harris trailed Trump by about 6 points — nearly matching Biden’s performance in 2020 (Trump +7).

Still, other suburbs around the country continued the Democratic drive. In the suburban counties surrounding Atlanta, for example, Harris was on track to do slightly better than Biden in 2020, increasing the Democratic margin in Cobb and Gwinnett counties by about a point each.

Democratic support among voters of color, especially Latinos, continues to erode

Pre-election polls showed Trump on track to post historic gains in support from non-white voters. Although we don’t yet have large national data (early exit measurements can be unreliable), we saw some dramatic shifts from places with large Latino populations.

The most obvious example is Florida. The state was moving in a decidedly Republican direction, and so was its Latino electorate. Miami-Dade County, which used to be a reliably Democratic county with a huge Cuban American population, swung for Trump by double digits. Osceola, a county with a large Puerto Rican community, also flipped for Trump after Biden won it by 14 points. And more specifically, cities with large Puerto Rican and Cuban populations, such as Kissimmee and Hialeah, saw dramatic drops in Democratic support, according to the Democratic firm Equis Research’s analysis. One caveat: Florida’s Latino population is unlike those in other parts of the country — it’s much more diverse in terms of national origin and had already been trending Republican after 2020.

Still, similar swings occurred in South Texas, where Trump widened his margins in the county he won in 2020, Zapata; flipped two more counties (Starr and Cameron); and nearly even ran with Harris in Hidalgo and Webb counties. Beyond these two states, which drifted further red, national exit polls, however unreliable, seem to paint a broader picture of eroding Democratic support among Latinos: Early results suggest Democrats narrowly won a majority of those voters after 2020 exit polls signaled Biden won by about two-thirds.