I haven’t done a lot of election analyses lately, but here’s a new one looking at how GOP presidential candidates did in the last four elections (Romney, then Trump, Trump, and Trump) in the highest income county in each state. This could be helpful when thinking about the upcoming 2026 results.
The most affluent county metric provides a mixed nuts assortment. Your state might be represented by a lightly populated ski or golf resort region. But the most typical type of wealthiest county in a state consists of suburbs of the biggest city in the region, such as the richest county in America, Loudon County, Virginia, out past Dulles Airport in fox-hunting country.
I sorted the table of the 50 states below by Trump’s share of the two-party vote in 2024 minus Romney’s share of the two-party vote in 2012.
Trump in 2024 won 2.7 percentage points more votes nationally than Romney did in 2012 (50.75% of the two-party vote in 2024 vs. 48.04% in 2012), fueled in part both by the expected — solid performance among whites without college degrees — and the unexpected — relatively strong showings among Hispanics, Asians, and black men.
But Trump in 2024 did notably worse than Romney in many nice white counties. Trump did worse in 37 of the 50 states’ richest counties.
Big 2026 questions include whether GOP candidates can maintain their strength among the white working class when the price of gasoline is so high? Was Trump’s performance among the Diverse in 2024 the start of a historic realignment or a one-time fluke for the GOP? And can Republicans start to rebuild their brands in their former strongholds, the upscale suburbs?
For example, in Johnson County, Kansas, the well-heeled suburbs of Kansas City, Missouri that Thomas Frank complained about so much in his book What’s the Matter With Kansas?, Romney won 58.9% of the two-party vote in 2012.
But in 2024, Trump earned only 43.3% of Johnson County’s vote, a decline of 15.6 percentage points in 12 years. That was even worse than he did in Forsyth County, Georgia, a prosperous suburb/exurb northwest of Atlanta, and Hamilton County, Indiana (home to Indianapolis’s utopian suburb of Carmel).
My table of the 50 states and more analysis is beyond the paywall:
Paywall here.
