Why is Donald Trump winning? 3 key factors that explain his swing state wins.

Though votes are still being counted and several battleground states remain to be called, we can see a handful of trends developing in the 2024 election. Former President Donald Trump is once again showing that he can turn already ruby-red parts of the country even more Republican. And in the suburbs, where Democrats have made gains throughout the Trump era, those gains seem inconsistent at best this time around.

Meanwhile, though it’s still too early to say for sure, it appears that Trump has made large-scale inroads with voters of color, particularly in Latino communities.

Exit polls, the main way commentators and journalists try to make sense of the electoral trends happening nationally, are notoriously unreliable, and it will be weeks, or months, before they paint a full picture. But here are some trends that appear clear so far.

Trump has been able to maximize his support in rural areas

Everyone expected Trump to dominate in rural areas. What wasn’t clear, however, was whether he could improve on the already large margins by which he won in 2020.

Still, it seems that he has. Early in the night, Trump built big cushions of support in Indiana, Kentucky, Georgia, and North Carolina. That trend continued throughout the night. In rural counties across Pennsylvania, for example, the general trend as votes were counted was that Trump was able to both increase turnout and increase his margin of support in the GOP heartland.

One obvious example of this rural surge: Lackawanna County, home to President Joe Biden’s hometown of Scranton, swung 5.6 points to the right from 2020 — even though Kamala Harris still looked on track to win the county by the smallest of margins.

The suburban shift toward Democrats stalled

To offset those expected GOP margins of support in rural places, Democrats have had to rely not just on winning urban centers, but getting a boost in surrounding suburbs. Those suburbs have been trending toward Democrats since 2016 — but it’s not clear today that this leftward lurch has continued.

The first clear sign of trouble in the suburbs came northern Virginia’s Loudoun County, a Washington, DC, suburb with a large concentration of college-educated voters. Joe Biden won it by about 25 points in 2020; this year, Harris appears to have won it by just about 17 points.

In Indiana’s Hamilton County, seen as perhaps an early indicator of other trends because of its Indianapolis suburbs, Harris was trailing Trump by about 6 points — running nearly even with Biden’s performance in 2020 (Trump +7).

Still, other suburbs around the country did continue that Democratic drift. In the suburban counties surrounding Atlanta, for example, Harris was on track to do a bit better than Biden in 2020, increasing the Democratic margin in Cobb and Gwinnett counties by about a point each.

Democratic support among voters of color, especially Latinos, is continuing to erode

Pre-election polling indicated that Trump was on track to post historic gains in support from nonwhite voters. Though we don’t have great national data yet (early exit polls can be unreliable), we did see some dramatic shifts from places with large Latino populations.

The most obvious example is Florida. The state moved in a decidedly Republican direction, and its Latino electorate did as well. Miami-Dade County, which used to be a reliably Democratic county with a huge Cuban American population, swung for Trump by double digits. Osceola, a county with a large Puerto Rican community, also flipped for Trump, after Biden won it by 14 points. And more specifically, cities with large Puerto Rican and Cuban populations, like Kissimmee and Hialeah, saw a dramatic drop-off in Democratic support, according to Democratic firm Equis Research’s analysis. One caveat: Florida’s Latino population is unlike those in other parts of the country — it’s much more diverse in terms of national origin and had been already shifting toward Republicans after 2020.

Still, similar swings happened in South Texas, where Trump expanded his margins in the county he won in 2020, Zapata; flipped two more counties (Starr and Cameron); and ran nearly even with Harris in Hidalgo and Webb counties. Beyond those two states, which drifted further red, national exit polls, as unreliable as they may be, seem to be painting a broader picture of eroding Democratic support with Latinos: Early results suggest Democrats just barely won the majority of these voters, after exit polls in 2020 signaled Biden won about two-thirds.