Did Trump gain ground in Sacramento and California? See vote share from 2020 to 2024
Kamala Harris soundly defeated Donald Trump in the Sacramento region and across California, but President-elect Donald Trump’s share of the vote grew in most places from 2020 to 2024—particularly in areas with a high proportion of Latino, Black or Asian residents, according to a Bee analysis of final election returns.
California election officials have spent weeks tabulating absentee votes and contacting some voters with questions. All four counties in the Sacramento region recently finished their counts. Most counties statewide are either done or almost done, with totals unlikely to change much.
In the Sacramento region, Harris won 54.2% of the vote, compared to 57.1% of the vote for the Joe Biden/Harris ticket in 2020. Harris picked up the strongest support close to Sacramento’s urban core, and in Davis. Vice President Harris, a former California attorney general and U.S. senator, was the Democratic nominee.
Trump won 42.4% of the vote in 2024 in the region, up from 40.4% of the vote in 2020. His strongest support came in Placer and El Dorado counties.
The vote share figures do not tell the whole story. Turnout fell across much of the region.
About 76.4% of registered voters in the four-county area voted for president this year, compared to 82.8% of registered voters in 2020. (Those figures exclude voters who skipped the presidential race or who wrote in a candidate.)
As a result, the number of votes cast for Trump in the region actually fell by about 1% as compared to 2020. The number of votes cast for Harris fell by 11% as compared to 2020.
Local results by ZIP code
Trump improved his vote share from 2020 to 2024 in 43 of the 57 Sacramento ZIP codes with at least 5,000 residents who voted in the 2024 presidential race.
Trump showed the greatest improvements in ZIP codes with a high proportion of Latino residents.
In the 10 local ZIPs with the highest proportion of residents who identify as Latino, Trump improved his share of the vote by about five percentage points from 2020 to 2024.
Mike Madrid, longtime Latino Republican political expert, attributed the shift among Latino voters to economic concerns and feeling dismissed by the Democratic Party.
“Where you’re seeing the most significant shifts is in the areas of the highest Latino concentration, where Latinos are moving away from being a racially/ethnically, immigration focused voter, towards a U.S.-born, more assimilated, economic pocketbook voter,” Madrid said in an interview.
Among the 10 local ZIPs with the highest proportion of Black residents, Trump improved his vote share by about four percentage points. Among the 10 local ZIPs with the highest proportion of Asian residents, Trump improved his vote share by about 3.5 percentage points.
Madrid pointed to a ZIP code covering parts of South Sacramento and the Valley Hi/North Laguna neighborhoods which saw a more than seven-point swing toward Trump this election.
“That’s the non-white share. This is a group that has been summarily dismissed” by Democrats who control California government, he said. “These are the most economically depressed, noncollege educated, are the people that are crying out for help the most and have been for decades.”
Sacramento Democratic strategist Bill Wong was also not surprised by the analysis and noted it aligns with Trump’s increased support among blue-collar workers.
“Our economic policy is not working for the average voter in these swing states (and) swing districts,” Wong said. “If you walk precincts in Bakersfield, walk precincts in Hanford, walk precincts with South Stockton, you get it.”
Even worse, Wong said, has been Democrats’ messaging on the economy and use of terms like “economic justice.”
“There’s no need to use three syllables when you could use the word ‘jobs,’” he said.
By contrast, in the 10 local ZIPs with the highest proportion of white residents, Trump improved his performance by about half of a percentage point.
Trump also improved his vote share in lower-income areas more than in higher-income areas, though the gains were not as significant as his improvement in areas with many people of color.
To be clear: Trump still won the highest share of votes in areas with a large proportion of white residents. He still got fewer votes than Harris in most most ZIP codes throughout the region.
But Trump did better throughout the Sacramento region during 2020 than during 2024, and much of his improvement came in areas with a high proportion of residents who identify as people of color.
Statewide trends
Many of the same trends seen in Sacramento played out across the state.
Trump won about 38.3% of the statewide vote in 2024, up from 34.3% in 2020. His vote share grew in 57 of the state’s 58 counties. The sole outlier was Plumas County, where Trump lost a fraction of a percent of his vote share compared to 2020.
Harris won about 58.5% of the statewide vote in 2024, compared to 63.5% for the Biden/Harris ticket in 2020.
Trump gained the most vote share in several counties with a high proportion of Latino residents.
His biggest gains, by far, were in Imperial County, a part of southern California near the Mexican border where 86% of residents identify as Hispanic or Latino.
Trump won 49.1% of the vote in Imperial County during 2024, compared to 48.3% of the vote for Harris. Trump’s vote share improved by about 12.5 percentage points in Imperial County from 2020 to 2024.
“We’re not seeing a shift in belief to more conservative viewpoints as much as we are seeing people not believing and trusting the Democratic Party to improve their lives anymore, and Imperial County is a perfect example of that,” Madrid said.
The county’s unemployment rate currently sits at 19.6% and has not dipped below 10% in more than 30 years.
Wong agreed with much of Madrid’s assessment that Democrats have failed to deliver for working class voters.
He said there were signs of “an attrition of Latino voters” in 2018 and 2020, when he worked on campaigns for Democratic Assembly candidates.
“People didn’t really want to vote for Trump, but they felt like they had no choice because of where the Democratic agenda and Democratic messaging was,” Wong said, referencing analysis and focus groups by Republican pollster Frank Luntz.
“These Latino voters have lost a huge amount of trust and confidence in the Democratic Party (because) there’s almost no economic indicators showing that the Democrats have improved their lives measurably in decades,” Madrid said.
Other than Imperial County, Trump also gained at least six percentage points of vote share in Merced, Sutter, San Joaquin, Tulare and San Bernardino counties. With the exception of Sutter, all of those counties have a higher proportion of residents who identify as Latino than the statewide rate.
“California very much could be on the cusp of as big of a generational shift as we saw in the early years after Proposition 187,” Madrid said, referring to the 1994 ballot proposition that briefly blocked undocumented immigrants from receiving public services like healthcare and education.
The measure galvanized Latino activism. Many of today’s elected Latino leaders began organizing in the aftermath of Prop 187.
But times have changed. Madrid said today’s younger Latino voters were mostly born in the United States and have no living memory of the political climate of the 1990s.
These voters have grown up in “a multi-racial society that doesn’t view the world through an ethnic lens. As a result, they’re viewing it through an economic pocketbook lens, which is pushing them to the right.”
“It’s one of the great ironies of politics,” he said.
This story was originally published December 10, 2024 at 6:13 AM.
