President-elect Donald Trump won more votes than many polls expected, including in deep-blue California, according to preliminary data.
As of Friday, California election officials had counted more than 10 million votes and needed to process an additional 5.4 million ballots.
An NBC4 I-Team analysis found that Trump received more votes percentage-wise than he did in 2020.
In 2024, Trump won nearly 40% of the votes already counted, compared to 34% in 2020. These numbers will continue to change as the count continues.
In Riverside County, 49.6% of ballots processed so far have gone for Trump, compared to 45% in 2020.
Data from Orange County shows a similar trend, with 48.9% of votes cast so far going to Trump, compared to 44.4% in 2020.
Even in Los Angeles County, where most voters identify as Democrats, 33.5% of votes went toward Trump as of Friday, compared with 26.8% four years ago. .
However, even though Mr. Trump received a high percentage of votes, it does not mean that he received many individual votes. According to Dr. Fernando Guerra, an NBC4 election analyst at Loyola Marymount University, that’s the main reason for the “enthusiasm gap” and low turnout.
“It seems to have been primarily among people who used to vote for Biden but haven’t come out and voted for Harris. That’s why people say Donald Trump is getting more votes. Not so much,” Guerra said. “The fact is, he’s getting about the same number of votes as he did in 2020, which means Harris got a lot fewer votes than Biden.”
Voter turnout in Los Angeles County appears to be down 10% from 2020, based on an analysis of the number of ballots counted but not yet processed.
Guerra also speculated that because California is not a battleground state, neither candidate received much attention, which may have led to voter apathy.
“Partly because people decided I couldn’t vote for Trump, but I’m also not keen on Harris. This is speculation without data, but what happened this Tuesday? “This is one of the hypotheses to explain this,” Guerra said.
