The Deep South is Still Racially Polarized: A Look at 2024 Election Data
There has always been a gap in the voting preferences of white and non-white voters. Recent Election Data shows that there is one region where racial polarization is unbelievably high.
VoteHub has recently published its precinct-level 2024 election map, which includes demographic details. I took a look at how white voters voted compared to non-white voters in each state. The results, while stunning, are in line with years of research.
They show that even though there naturally is a gap between white and non-white voters, especially in states where the African American population makes up the largest chunk of non-white voters, there is still a striking geographical divide. It’s the South, the states of the former confederacy, that showed the highest levels of racial polarization. Let’s take a look at the map.
Here’s how the score is calculated for each state: When you hover over the state, you can see the margins with which Trump or Harris won white and non-white voters in the state. When there is a large gap between the two, the racial polarization score is higher. An example: In Louisiana, Trump won white voters by 66.2 percentage points and Harris non-white voters by 59.2 points, making for a polarization score of 125.4.
Anyone can immediately see differences in the scope of polarization that seem to be somehow tied to geographical location. First, it can be noted that states in western America have lower polarization scores than the national average for two reasons:
Hispanics make up the largest share of non-white voters in the West and they vote less democratic than other non-white voters, particularly African Americans. This makes Harris win the non-white vote here by only about 20-30 points
Many blue states in the west, like California, Oregon or Colorado, have very liberal white voters. While Trump won white voters nationwide by about 17 points, he lost the white vote in many of these states to Harris, at times with double digits.
It’s important to add that, from 2016 to 2024, Hispanics shifted to Trump (Harris only won Hispanics by 10 points). If that shift reverses - and recent job approval polls for Trump among that group suggest it may - states in the west may look a bit more racially polarized.
Much of the Midwest and northeast, up to New York, showed racial polarization scores during the 2024 election that came in close to the national average of 53.6. Again, there are two main reasons for this trend:
Harris won the non-white vote by larger margins because African Americans were the largest group among the non-white voters.
White voters were more in line with the national average, with Trump winning them with margins between 3 points (New York) and almost 30 points (Indiana).
The further South you go, the higher Trump’s support with white voters gets.
The Deep South
The former confederate states, also known as the Deep South, had the highest racial polarization in the 2024 election. The margins for Harris among non-white voters are the same here as they are in midwestern states like Michigan and Pennsylvania, so the extreme racial polarization has a different cause: white voters.
White voters routinely favor Trump with margins of 20-30% across many US states, but in the Deep South, they were an unbelievably homogenous voting group. The difference to African American voters, another homogenous voting group, is the geographical divide. While African Americans vote about the same across the country, only white voters in the South show such extreme margins for Republicans.
This level of racial polarization between white and non-white voters we see in the Deep South is unprecedented in the rest of the United States, and, quite frankly, it is a phenomenon not known in most countries of the world.
The South was once the epicenter of slavery, the Confederacy, and segregation. After the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 by Democrats, white southerners - a formerly democratic voting bloc - turned to Republicans out of their disapproval with the fact that African Americans had secured their civil rights. At the core of this party shift amongst white southerners lies a deep racism that Republicans played to in the 60s and 70s with their “southern strategy”. Statistical analysis of our data proves that states that were part of the Confederacy showed significantly higher racial polarization in the 2024 election than Union states. Their avg. polarization score was twice as high than the score for states of the Union (91 to 41). These results may hint at the fact that much of the South still suffers from the aftermath of decades of slavery, segregation, and hate.
A quick reminder of the effects: If white voters in Mississippi, a state Trump won by almost 23 points, would vote the same as white voters in North Dakota, a state where Trump still won the group with a whooping 43-point margin, then Mississippi would be a swing state.
In fact, most of the South would. A state where this is evident is Georgia, where the white vote has shifted to Democrats as the growing Atlanta metro area attracts more and more Americans. This urbanization of Georgia has made the state a swing state, not only because of growing diversity, but because white voters in big cities like Atlanta tend to vote for Democrats.
These findings for the 2024 election are in line with an extensive study of racial polarization in the 2016 and 2020 elections. From 2016 to 2024, Trump has seen gains among minority groups and losses among white voters that have slightly reduced racial polarization. In the Deep South, those trends were far too small to overcome the past.