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POLITICAL COMMENTARY

Checking Back on Key 2024 Counties, Part One: The Industrial North

A Commentary By J. Miles Coleman

KEY POINTS FROM THIS ARTICLE

— Before the 2024 election, the Crystal Ball isolated several key counties in Toss-up states. We are circling back to see what the results in those counties said about the overall election.

— Several Democratic-trending suburban and touristy counties in the Industrial North continued to move left, although just not by the margins that Kamala Harris would have needed.

— In Pennsylvania, Donald Trump’s notable gains in the Scranton area played into his strong 2024 showing in the state.

— Sticking to the Industrial North generally, and in 2026 news, Sen. Gary Peters’s (D-MI) retirement opens up a Senate seat in Michigan for the second time in as many cycles.

Key counties in the Industrial North

Last year, ahead of the 2024 election, we went through each of the seven presidential Toss-up states and flagged counties that we thought would be important to watch. Well, with the election several months in the rearview mirror, we’ll be going back to see what the Crystal Ball counties told us—or, what they didn’t—about how the overall contest shook out.

For this issue, we’ll be looking back at the three Industrial North states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

At one level, the election was anti-climactic in that Trump carried all the Toss-up states. But, as we’ll see, some counties that we flagged continued to drift against him while others shifted especially strongly in his direction.

In Michigan, we flagged Grand Traverse County, which is the most populous county along the northwestern part of the state’s touristy “Cherry Coast.” Though Trump still carried Grand Traverse County, it was the only county in the state that he won with less than a majority of the vote. As it turned out, the 2024 election established the Cherry Coast as the most Democratic-trending area of the state, at least in the short term. Compared to his 2020 showing in the state, Trump only lost ground in 7 of Michigan’s 83 counties—but 5 of those 7 were northwestern counties that border Lake Michigan.

Meanwhile, the other county that we singled out in Michigan, Saginaw, continued its bellwether streak. With a racial breakdown that matches the state almost perfectly, it gave Barack Obama double-digit margins in 2008 and 2012, before flipping to Trump by a point. Joe Biden narrowly carried it by three-tenths of a point, but last year, Trump reclaimed it by a relatively comfortable 51%-48%. Saginaw County also told us something about how Michigan’s down-ballot races shook out: it was the only Trump-won county that backed now-Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D), and now-Rep. Kristen McDonald Rivet’s (D, MI-8) 51%-45% margin there was part of her impressive showing holding a marginal, Trump-won open seat.

In Wisconsin, we were watching Ozaukee County as something of a directional bellwether. Along with nearby Waukesha and Washington counties, the WOW counties border Milwaukee County to the north and west. These three counties have traditionally been solid red, although they have all gotten more competitive in the Trump times. Ozaukee, as the least red of the trio, seemed to have at least an outside chance of flipping to Harris if the election went well enough for Democrats.

While Harris obviously lost the state, she still managed to narrow the gap in the WOW counties, improving slightly on Joe Biden’s deficit in each. In Ozaukee County specifically, Trump’s margin fell from 55%-43% in 2020 to 54%-44% last year. Because Trump’s margin in the state was just under 1 percentage point, 2024 was the first postwar presidential election where Ozaukee County voted within 10 points of the statewide vote.

Drilling further down, in 2020, Biden became the first Democratic presidential nominee in decades to carry a municipality in Ozaukee County, as he won the city of Cedarburg by three-tenths of a percentage point. Harris expanded on Biden’s margin in Cedarburg and flipped Thiensville, a village in the southern part of the county that is close to the Milwaukee border. Thiensville is surrounded by Ozaukee County’s largest municipality, the city of Mequon. Considering its demographics—it is overwhelmingly white and has a 70% college attainment rate—and recent electoral trajectory, it would probably be a surprise if Mequon stayed red in 2028: Trump’s 12-point margin there from 2016 fell to 2 points in 2020, and he only carried it by half a point in 2024.

Moving several counties north, 2024 appears to have ended Door County’s run as a statewide bellwether. Harris’s 2.2-point margin there represented an improvement over Biden’s showing in that touristy county that has otherwise nicely mirrored the state since 2008. Harris’s relatively strong performance in Door County seems predicated on her support from wealthier retirees. The city of Sturgeon Bay, which is the county seat, sits roughly around the middle of the county. North of Sturgeon Bay, a section of the county that consists of 10 municipalities protrudes into Lake Michigan. All 10 of the county’s northern towns have an average resident age of over 50 and they, collectively, swung 3 percentage points towards Harris from Biden. There likely are similar dynamics in both Door County on one side of Lake Michigan and the aforementioned Michigan Cherry Coast counties on the other side of the lake. Map 1 shows the 2024 swing and average age in Door County.

Map 1: Door County in 2024

In 2024, the better bellwether for Wisconsin turned out to be Sauk County, which is just northwest of Madison’s Dane County. Its mix of college students, rural voters, bedroom communities, and former industrial towns just proved more reflective of the state: as Trump flipped it back after winning it in 2016 and losing it in 2020, it also narrowly backed Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D), who narrowly won reelection. But Sauk, unlike Door, backed a statewide loser in 2022, which shows that even some usually solid bellwethers can break sometimes.

Last month, we dedicated an article to some of the granular movements that defined Wisconsin in 2024, touching on some of these same themes. Wisconsin also has a hugely important state Supreme Court race coming up in April, in which Democrats will try to maintain the current 4-3 liberal majority on the state’s highest court.

In Pennsylvania, we selected Cumberland and Lackawanna counties as our areas to watch in the election—the former is in Harrisburg’s orbit while the latter includes the city of Scranton. While both counties moved, directionally, as we expected, they basically represented extremes when put into the context of the larger statewide vote: Cumberland County saw the most pro-Democratic swing from 2020 to 2024, as Harris improved on Biden’s margin by just over a percentage point, while Lackawanna County, which swung nearly 6 percentage points to Trump, saw the second most pro-Republican swing in the state.

Broadly, Republicans enjoyed a strong election cycle in Pennsylvania: It was the only one of the three Industrial North Toss-ups states that gave Trump a majority of the vote. Republicans also swept the state’s four non-presidential statewide races, which included narrowly ousting Sen. Bob Casey (D), and flipping two marginal House seats in the eastern part of the state. With that, Trump improved on his 2020 margins in all but 13 of the state’s 67 counties, as Map 2 shows.

Map 2: 2020-2024 swing in Pennsylvania

Relatively speaking, south central Pennsylvania was a bright spot for Harris, as about half of the counties where Trump lost ground were in that region. So while our pre-election expectation was that Cumberland County would shift left, which it did, the movement was fairly limited, making it more representative of south central Pennsylvania, as opposed to the state as a whole. It’s also worth noting that while Trump’s percentage margin was very slightly smaller in these highlighted blue counties, he actually netted more raw votes out of nearly all of them in 2024 than he did in 2020 as their turnout slightly increased.

Meanwhile, Trump’s gains were the largest in northeastern Pennsylvania. Lackawanna, along with nearby Monroe and Pike counties, were the only three counties that swung more than 5 percentage points to Trump. The swing in Lackawanna County suggests that Biden probably got at least something of a “hometown” boost in 2020: While most of the 40 municipalities that make up the county swung right in 2024, Scranton proper saw one of the sharpest swings, dropping from Biden +27 to Harris +19. Predictably, Harris saw very small gains in some of the county’s wealthier towns, namely Clarks Green and Glenburn. Last week, Guest Columnist Nick Field noted that even Biden’s presence on the 2020 ballot did not reverse some of the registration gains that Republicans have been making in the northeastern part of the state.

Before the election, we wrote that Harris would probably want to be in between Hillary Clinton’s (3.5%) and Biden’s (8.4%) margins in the county if she wanted to be on track to carry the state. Harris held the county, but her 2.8% margin was worse than Clinton’s.

As an aside, we would guess that the pro-Trump swings in Monroe and Pike counties were less about any affinity for Biden and had more to do with their proximity to New York City, which saw one of the most acute redshifts of any metro area. That swing seemed to bleed into New Jersey, which is mostly contained within the New York City media market—Pike County is also in that media market. While Monroe County residents are in Scranton’s media market, it is still home to a sizable number of workers who commute into New York City. Put more concretely, according to Redistricter, only 34% of Pike and Monroe County’s total residents were born in Pennsylvania—statewide, 72% of Pennsylvania’s residents were born there. Electorally, the swings in the two counties obviously hurt Harris at a statewide level, but they were also not helpful to now-former Reps. Susan Wild (D, PA-7) and Matt Cartwright (D, PA-8), whose districts cover the area.

Before 2024, Pennsylvania had two obvious bellwether counties: Erie, in the northwest, and Northampton, on the eastern border with New Jersey. Both were Trump-to-Biden counties that Trump flipped back, although Trump’s larger margin in the latter lined up exactly with his statewide margin. In the Senate race, Casey held Erie County while losing his seat but Northampton County backed now-Sen. Dave McCormick (R).

Next time, we’ll look back to see how the counties that we flagged in the Sun Belt Toss-up states performed.

Another Senate cycle, another open seat in Michigan

But to conclude this issue, we are going back to where we began: Michigan. On Tuesday, two-term Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI) announced that he would not run for a third term next year. While Peters’s move came as at least a mild surprise, after two cycles leading the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, we would not exactly fault him for passing on what could be another competitive race. But the Peters news means that, for the second time in as many cycles, Michigan will host an open-seat Senate race: now-former Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) kicked off the 2024 Senate cycle with a retirement announcement of her own. Democrats held Stabenow’s seat with now-Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D), although the Michigan result was the narrowest Democratic win on the 2024 Senate map.

Peters’s retirement also means that all statewide offices on the 2026 ballot in Michigan will be open-seat contests; after two successful midterms, Democrats are going into the election holding every statewide post. Outgoing Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI), the most prominent Democrat in the state, would have been an overwhelming favorite in a primary, although she is staying out of the race, likely with 2028 presidential intentions in mind. Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson (D), who announced a run to replace Whitmer last week, may have welcomed Peters’s retirement—now, other ambitious Democrats who might have been considering a gubernatorial run may look to the Senate. Former Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg (D), a former mayor of South Bend, Indiana who recently relocated to Michigan, was also immediately floated as a potential candidate, but the “carpetbagger” label would be easily affixed to him in both a primary and a general election. An open seat might also make the Senate race more appealing to ambitious Republicans, too. Republicans have not won a Senate race in Michigan since 1994 but they came within 2 points in 2020 and half a point in 2024.

While the political parties themselves would usually like to be defending incumbents instead of open seats, Peters may at least be trying to pass the torch off at an advantageous time for Democrats. If 2026 shakes out like a typical midterm, the national environment may at least be in their favor, and Democrats would not have to contend with Trump at the top of the ticket. Ironically enough, though, Peters’s own career offers a bit of a counterfactual to this reasoning: He was elected to the Senate in 2014, which was a red wave year—and, as we’ve seen in recent cycles, depending on factors like candidate quality, adverse political climates can be overcome. While we have not published our initial ratings for the 2026 Senate races yet—stay tuned—Peters’s retirement does impact our thinking to at least some degree. Michigan was likelier to start in Leans Democratic prior to Peters’s retirement but it now may be more of a Toss-up.

J. Miles Coleman is an elections analyst for Decision Desk HQ and a political cartographer.

See Other Political Commentary by J. Miles Coleman.

See Other Political Commentary.

Views expressed in this column are those of the author, not those of Rasmussen Reports. Comments about this content should be directed to the author or syndicate.

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