The Cities Didn’t Deliver for Harris
An underappreciated factor in her election loss is the key urban areas that turned out fewer voters for her than for Biden in 2020.
KAMALA HARRIS’S WHOLE CAMPAIGN was predicated on driving turnout in the big cities in the swing states: Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Atlanta—plus, in an optimistic scenario, Charlotte, Phoenix, and Las Vegas. Harris’s doable goal in her campaign’s plan was to get more votes in the big cities in 2024 than Biden got in 2020.
The core of the strategy wasn’t to change voters’ minds or to win over swing constituencies—though there was some of that, too, especially in the suburbs. Rather, it was to generate massive raw vote totals in the large urban areas that traditionally favor Democrats.
This strategy worked in the past: One reason Joe Biden won the presidency in 2020 is that he racked up huge votes in big cities. Even in a place like Philadelphia—which, in a portent of things to come, Trump contested more closely in 2020 than he had in 2016—the sheer magnitude of the Democratic vote helped flip the state from red to blue.
This year, in Philadelphia County, Harris earned 567,000 votes to Trump’s 144,000. But Biden beat Trump in the same county in 2020 by 604,000 to 133,000. Biden got about 37,000 more votes in Philadelphia in 2020 than Harris got in 2024.
Considering the wider Philadelphia metro area—Philadelphia, Allegheny, Montgomery, Bucks, and Delaware Counties—Biden received about 69,000 more votes than Harris. Biden’s margin in the state was about 82,000 votes, so those extra 69,000 votes in Philadelphia go a long way to explaining why he won and Harris lost.
The same is true for Michigan. In Wayne County (home of Detroit), Harris received about 60,000 fewer votes than Biden did in 2020. Add in the other most populous counties in Michigan—Oakland , Macomb, Kent, and Genesee—and the result is 85,000 fewer votes for Harris than for Biden four years ago.
The vote totals in these cities weren’t on their own decisive in causing Harris’s loss to Trump, but they are among the underappreciated reasons for the result. Trump won Pennsylvania this year by about 132,000 votes and Michigan by about 80,000 votes, so even if Harris had done as well as Biden in the big counties in those states, it still wouldn’t have been quite enough.
Likewise, in Wisconsin, where Trump won this time by about 30,000 votes, Harris received about 12,000 more votes in Madison and Milwaukee than Biden did.
And it wasn’t just in those Midwest swing states either. In North Carolina, Harris ran only even with, not better than, Biden in the urban centers—in fact, the difference in their raw vote totals was just 640 votes across Mecklenburg, Wake, and Durham Counties. In the counties that contain Atlanta proper, Fulton and DeKalb, Harris received a total of about 4,500 fewer votes than Biden. Her campaign was predicated on massive turnout in the cities, and at best she ran about equal with Biden.
The higher turnout expectation in these two Southern states had a basis in demographics: North Carolina’s population grew by about 400,000 since 2020, while Georgia gained about 250,000, plus both are among the states with the highest African American populations (Georgia with 32 percent, NC with 22 percent).
The problem for Harris wasn’t just the share of the vote—that a higher percentage of voters in urban areas chose Trump—but the overall turnout. In Philadelphia County, about 21,000 fewer people voted this year than in 2020. In Wayne County, it was 15,000 fewer.
Since the shock of Trump’s victory in 2016, Democrats have been struggling with how to appeal to blue-collar suburban and rural voters. Part of the party’s answer was nominating candidates like Scranton Joe Biden and John Fetterman (former mayor of an old Pittsburgh-area steel mill town), as well as making massive investments in rural broadband, infrastructure, manufacturing, and a series of pro-union policies. But all that investment may have boomeranged: Washington Post columnist Heather Long points out that urban counties with the highest costs of living shifted the most toward Trump. Biden and the Democrats aren’t uniquely responsible for cities being expensive, but underlying inflation exacerbated by massive government spending during and after COVID didn’t help.
After the shock of Trump’s re-election in 2024, Democrats now also have to contend with how to win back the cities by margins that allow them to carry swing states. In the past, Democrats relied on their coalition of minority groups—especially black voters—to propel their urban victories. No more: Long also highlights that the least-white urban areas shifted the most toward Trump. As minorities drift toward the GOP, Democrats will have to rethink how to appeal to urban voters, not as members of identity groups based on race or culture, but as urbanites.
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