Early results show that Donald Trump got more votes than many polls predicted, even in California, which is a very blue state.
More than 10 million votes have been counted in California so far this week, and there are still 5.4 million ballots to go through.
Based on percentages, the NBC4 I-Team found that Trump is getting more votes than he did in 2020.
Trump got almost 40% of the votes that had already been counted in 2024, up from 34% in 2020. As the count goes on, these numbers will keep changing.
So far, 49.6% of the ballots counted in Riverside County went for Trump. In 2020, that number will drop to 45%.
The same thing was seen in Orange County, where 48.9% of the votes counted so far went to Trump, compared to 44.4% in 2020.
A lot of Democrats vote in Los Angeles County, and as of Friday, 33.5% of the votes there went to Trump, up from 26.8% four years ago. This shows that support for Trump is also growing there.
Trump has a bigger share of the vote, but that does not mean he got more individual votes. That is a big reason for the “enthusiasm gap” and fewer people voting, says Dr. Fernando Guerra of Loyola Marymount University and NBC4 Election Analyst.
“It looks like most of them were people who voted for Biden before and are not going to vote for Harris now,” Guerra said. “So it is not so much that Trump is getting more votes.”
“In fact, he is getting about the same number of votes as he did in 2020.” It is that Biden got a lot more votes than Harris.
Based on the number of ballots that have been counted but not yet processed, Los Angeles County’s voter turnout seems to have dropped by 10% since 2020.
Guerra also thought that because California is not a battleground state, neither candidate put a lot of effort into it, which might have made people not care about voting.
“Part of the reason is that people told me I could not vote for Trump, but I also do not like Harris.” “That is a guess; I do not have the facts to back it up, but that is one idea that could explain what happened this Tuesday,” Guerra said.
