Small Town America Is Turning On Trump
2024 Republican primary voting data reveals a growing problem for Trump in small-town America.
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Trump’s Small-Town Problem
Our political coverage in America tends to favor easy-to-tell stories: Red versus Blue, urban versus rural, men versus women. But the truth is that things are never that clear.
One of the trends that seems to cut across all of the constructs as it relates to Republican voters in 2024 is that there is an epidemic of Trump fatigue among segments of the Republican Party.
The latest area where voting data has found signals of fatigue might come as a surprise. There are parts of small-town America, especially in swing states, that have soured on Trump.
Politico did an analysis of 1,000 red-leaning counties and they found:
But a POLITICO analysis shows there’s also a significant bloc of voters who did not want Trump in more exurban, red-leaning counties — the kinds of places that were skeptical of Trump in the 2016 GOP primary and, while largely voting for him in the 2016 and 2020 general elections, have remained somewhat resistant to his takeover of the Republican Party.
The analysis of GOP presidential primary results from more than 1,000 counties shows warning signs for Trump, especially as Republican voters continued to vote against him in closed primaries after he clinched the nomination. And it makes clear that, while independents and crossover voters may have boosted former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley in some primaries, a chunk of true Republican voters still wished for someone else to be the party’s nominee.
At this point, it is important to note that this data won’t reflect the experiences of every person living in a small town. Plenty of people will say Trump is just as strong as ever where they live, but even in areas where Trump has been traditionally strong, there have been signs of support erosion.
There isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer for why small-town support is slipping for Trump, but we’ll discuss some of the factors below.
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