Support for President-elect Donald Trump has grown in nearly every city and town in the Bay Area since 2016, including significant inroads in some of the Bay Area’s most Democratic strongholds.
In 67 of the region’s 69 cities and towns, the number of votes Trump received in 2024 was higher than in 2016, and a new analysis of election data by the Bay Area News Group found one particularly significant factor: income.
The places with the lowest incomes — San Pablo, Richmond, Antioch, Oakland, San Leandro, Pittsburg and East Palo Alto — all tallied at least 50% more Trump votes in 2024, while the highest-income cities and towns showed the least change overall.
“Overwhelmingly, this is an affordability issue,” said Mike Madrid, a Republican political strategist and author of a new book about Latino voters, “The Latino Century.” “It’s not a jobs issue, it’s not a taxes issue, it’s not your standard Republican perspective on the economy.”
“This is entirely consistent with what we have been seeing nationally,” Madrid said.
Of the 10 Bay Area cities with the highest share of votes for Democrats in 2016, five counted at least a 50% increase in votes for Trump, a Republican, in 2024, a figure that’s higher than the regional average.
East Palo Alto — with a median household income of $105,000, the lowest in San Mateo County — had the region’s most dramatic increase in Trump voters, more than tripling from 409 in 2016 to 1,282 in 2024. His vote share grew from 6% to 19% of voters.
“That’s an area that’s economically disadvantaged, where people are really feeling the inflation and the increase in the cost of things like groceries and gasoline,” said Melissa Michelson, a political science professor at Menlo College.
The city of 30,000 people is nestled between two much wealthier cities, Menlo Park and Palo Alto, where Trump gained 32% and 31% more votes in 2024, respectively.
Cities like East Palo Alto, which was predominantly Black a few decades ago and is now majority Latino, have been Democratic strongholds in recent decades. But in 2020, the city started to shift more red. There was another increase for Trump in 2024.
On the campaign trail, Vice President Kamala Harris did not successfully separate herself from the dissatisfaction with President Joe Biden, whom many voters, and Trump, blamed for the country’s inflation and other economic woes. Harris received 13.8% fewer votes than Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton did in East Palo Alto in 2024, the largest such decrease noted in any area city.
“We are moving, and have been moving for some time, away from a racially and ethnically prioritized voter toward a more economic, populist, pocketbook voter,” Madrid said. “The data has been very clear to me for 10 years. This is a working-class problem.”
Trump’s populist messaging appears to have resonated with an increasingly large share of the electorate in the Bay Area. While he only received 17.7% of the region’s vote in 2016, he received 24% of votes in 2024 across Alameda, Contra Costa, San Francisco, San Mateo and Santa Clara counties, his largest vote share of his three elections.
Overall, the number of Trump voters increased by 43% from 2016 to 2024, according to election results finalized in early December.
“This blue bubble that we think we live in isn’t really a blue bubble,” Michelson said.
And with election results finalized earlier this month, it’s become clear that even some of the bluest cities have started to look a lot more violet with each of the last two elections, although Trump voters are not as visible in the region as elsewhere in the state.
In the Bay Area, “people that do vote for Trump, they tend to maintain a low profile,” said Tom Weissmiller, a San Mateo resident and elected member of the San Mateo County Republican Party.
Republicans in the Bay Area have learned to “look over your shoulders on both sides” before discussing their views, Weissmiller said, because “the vitriol that would come out against Republicans was staggering.”
But “there is a sea change going on in the Bay Area” Weissmiller said. More people are voting for Trump, and Republican voter registrations are rising again after reaching historic lows.
Only 20 cities saw an increase in Harris’ margin compared to Clinton’s against Trump, but eight of the nine cities with at least $250,000 median household income saw her margin grow.
Turnout also appears to be a factor. In East Palo Alto, turnout dropped to 56.8% this year after peaking at 72.5% in 2020, but Trump votes tripled there, and his vote share grew even more.
When Trump first ran, he received 5.9% of the vote in East Palo Alto. Only Emeryville, Oakland and Berkeley had lower support for him that year. But in 2020, his vote share grew to 11.2%, and the city dropped to eighth on the list of bluest places. This year, it dropped further down the list, to 16, with the former and future president getting 19.1% of votes in the city in 2024.
Across the region, Biden won the 2020 election with about 20% more votes than Clinton did in 2016. But overshadowed by Biden’s win, Trump’s support quietly grew by twice that in the region in 2020.
And this year Trump maintained his 2020 gains and even grew them slightly.
Harris, on the other hand, lost nearly the entire bump for Biden in 2020, despite her close personal ties to the state as a former U.S. senator and California’s attorney general.
Richmond and San Pablo in Contra Costa County also saw support for Trump more than double. Those cities’ residents are also predominantly Latino and Black, and those cities also fall toward the bottom when it comes to income, with median household income of $90,000 and $78,000 respectively.
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In Kamala Harris’ home county 1 in 5 Biden voters disappeared in 2024
The highly affluent communities of Moraga and Piedmont, in the Oakland hills, were the only two municipalities that saw fewer Trump votes this year than in 2016.
The median income in Moraga is $194,000 a year, and in Piedmont it is at least $250,000.
As for the future for Democrats, Madrid thinks this election is a warning.
“You can’t excuse or explain or pretend that this is not bad news,” he said. “It’s bad news.”
