As the votes were counted and the races called, local Democrats had a decent showing last week in Passaic County, N.J., where 43 percent of residents identified as Hispanic in the 2020 census. The party swept the races for U.S. Senate, sheriff and county commissioners.
But one Democrat didn’t do as well: Kamala Harris. In the same county that Joe Biden carried by 17 percentage points, and Hillary Clinton by 23, Donald J. Trump is currently leading by three points. There are still some ballots to be counted, but it’s a clear departure from the definitive win of the past two Democratic nominees.
“I was astonished,” said Sean Trende, the senior elections analyst at RealClearPolitics. “I didn’t see that coming miles away. I knew he was going to do well with Hispanic voters. But I didn’t expect that.”
It was always on the table for Mr. Trump to sweep the swing states as he sailed to victory last week. But he also racked up many other successes, making modest but important gains among Hispanic voters, Black voters and voters in urban districts, including big, Democrat-dominated cities like New York and Chicago.
Some of those gains may have been surprising, even to election analysts. But to a great extent, the pre-election polls had it right. Not only did they correctly suggest that the presidential race would be close overall, but they also anticipated Mr. Trump’s inroads among groups that typically tilt heavily toward Democrats.
“When you look at how Hispanic Americans voted, how younger Black men voted, and some other things, it ties in with the trends that we were seeing,” said Lydia Saad, a senior editor for the Gallup Poll. “Did we see this coming? The answer to a lot of it is yes.” She added, though, that there had been an open question heading into Election Day of whether Ms. Harris could claw back some support from these groups.
The data on how these groups voted is still limited. Short of relying on exit polls — which have a history of inaccuracy, particularly with measuring Black and Hispanic voters — we’ll only be able to get a complete picture when final results have been certified and researchers have had a chance to survey the voters who actually cast a ballot. But for now, county and precinct data can provide an outline.
Hispanic voters
One month after Ms. Harris became the Democratic nominee, two analysts at Split Ticket, an election analytics and polling website, combed the recent polls to see how she was doing with groups who had been drifting away from Mr. Biden, such as Hispanic voters. They found that, while Ms. Harris had made up ground, she still wasn’t attracting the levels of support that Mr. Biden enjoyed in 2020, and was miles from where Mrs. Clinton was in 2016.
It was one of the earliest signs in the polls of the rightward shift that emerged on Election Day.
In looking at the available county and precinct data, there are many examples of areas like Passaic County breaking for Mr. Trump. Nearly all of the predominately Hispanic counties along Texas’ border with Mexico flipped to Mr. Trump in this election, including Starr County, where voters hadn’t supported a Republican for president in a century.
Parts of Central Florida with large Hispanic populations also lurched right, including Osceola County, a majority Hispanic county that had backed Mr. Biden by 14 points in 2020 and Mrs. Clinton by 25 points in 2016. On average, Hispanic-majority counties shifted toward Mr. Trump by 13 percentage points compared with 2020, according to a New York Times analysis conducted immediately after the election.
Black voters
There were also rightward shifts evident among Black voters, though they were smaller overall. In North Carolina, Mr. Trump flipped Nash County, an area with a large Black population that Mr. Biden narrowly won in 2020, and improved his margin in Hertford and Northampton, two majority Black counties.
In Georgia, Mr. Trump improved upon his 2020 results in majority Black counties and flipped others with large Black populations, including Baldwin County and Pasquotank County. Nationally, Black-majority counties shifted more than two points to the right on average, according to the Times analysis.
Pre-election polls did capture these shifts fairly clearly, and repeatedly.
There is a hesitancy among experts to put too much weight on cross tabs — the breakdown of poll results by subgroups, such as race or ethnicity — because in a single poll, the sample size is small and the margin of error wide. But when looking at polls collectively, or at a poll that oversamples the population of interest (as two Times/Siena College polls did for Hispanic and Black voters), Mr. Trump’s gains among these groups became apparent.
In those two Times/Siena polls, Ms. Harris led by 78 percent to 15 percent among Black likely voters nationally, and by 56-37 among Hispanic likely voters. But this was a noticeable drop in support: Mr. Biden carried Black voters with 90 percent in 2020, and Mrs. Clinton carried Black voters with 92 percent in 2016, according to estimates from studies of validated voters by the Pew Research Center, post-election assessments by Catalist and exit polls by the National Election Pool.
Other polls fielded in the final weeks of the campaign showed similar margins. Ms. Harris had as low as 71 percent support from Black voters in one national poll, and only 38 percent support from Hispanic voters in another. While we still don’t have the full data from this election, the available results suggest the polls were capturing a genuine shift.
“There were definitely signs,” said Luis Jimenez, a political science professor at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. “I think both the Democrats and people like me missed it to a large extent.”
Big-city voters
A similar pattern emerged in big cities. Mr. Trump got tens of thousands more votes in New York City this year than he did in 2020, helping him to slash the Democrats’ margin of victory there. Mrs. Clinton had won the city by nearly 63 points and Mr. Biden by 54; Ms. Harris won by 37.
In Chicago, Mr. Trump nearly doubled his share of the vote compared with 2016, with 22 percent backing him.
In Florida, Mr. Trump flipped Miami-Dade County, the first Republican to win there since George H.W. Bush in 1988. Philadelphia, to a smaller degree, also nudged right, with Mr. Trump winning in five of the city’s 66 wards, all of them majority white, compared with the three he won in 2020.
The Times analysis of voter swings found urban counties had moved 5.8 points to the right, on average.
Many of the most notable shifts happened in cities that weren’t in swing states, so those cities were rarely polled, especially toward the end of the race. But there were signs in the handful of polls that did focus on these regions.
A Times/Siena pre-election poll of New York City showed Ms. Harris leading Mr. Trump by just 39 points, roughly the same as her final margin. A Times/Philadelphia Inquirer/Siena poll of Philadelphia showed Ms. Harris up 79-16 in the city, though in the final result, Mr. Trump closed the gap slightly to 79-20.
And in Miami, a late summer poll from a former Trump campaign staffer showed the two candidates in a dead heat, though it wound up underestimating Mr. Trump’s lead in the region.
While not always perfect, the available polling did provide hints that these cities, like so much of the country, were on a path to the right.
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