In summary
The president-elect increased his vote share in 45 of 58 California counties in 2024. And Kamala Harris won 1.8 million fewer votes statewide than Joe Biden in 2020.
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No Republican presidential candidate has won California since George H.W. Bush made it five in a row for the GOP in 1988. So it’s no big surprise that Democratic nominee Kamala Harris easily won California’s 54 electoral votes this November.
But while the vice president defeated Donald Trump 58.5% to 38%, she did much worse in her home Golden State than Joe Biden did in 2020: She lost vote share in all but one of the state’s 58 counties (including several with sizable Latino populations), and she lost at least 10 percentage points of the vote in 43 counties.
Statewide, Harris won more than 1.8 million fewer votes than Biden’s 11.1 million — a main reason why Trump is headed toward winning the national popular vote.
Harris got more votes — 3 — than Biden in a single county: Alpine, the state’s least populous county, with only about 1,500 residents. Trump lost one vote in that county.
With the statewide count virtually complete before today’s deadline for counties to certify their results, the returns show that more voters didn’t vote at all: Nearly 90% of counties reported fewer total votes for president in last month’s election compared to four years ago.
Trump had a more mixed performance across the state in 2024 compared to 2020. While he received about 74,000 more votes statewide this time, he got fewer votes in 29 counties.
For example, Trump did better in the state’s most populous county, Los Angeles, where he got roughly 44,000 more votes compared to 2020 out of more than 3.7 million ballots. Harris got more than 600,000 fewer votes than Biden in 2020 and lost more than 20 percentage points of vote share as a result.
As elections data expert Rob Pyers has detailed, Trump flipped 10 counties, but not necessarily because more people voted for him than four years ago. Instead, Harris did significantly worse.
For instance, Trump flipped Lake County, but he only got 38 more votes in the rural county compared to 2020. Harris, on the other hand, underperformed Biden by about 2,150 votes, and candidates from other parties won 804.
Lake is one of eight counties where the percentage difference between Harris and Trump was smaller than the share won by minor party candidates, the largest of which was Orange County where Harris won 49.7% to 47.1%, but other candidates received a combined 3.2%.
