Preliminary data shows President-elect Donald Trump earned more votes than many polls had projected including in the deep-blue state of California.
As of Friday, California election workers have counted more than 10 million votes and 5.4 million more ballots to process,
The NBC4 I-Team analysis revealed that – percentage wise – Trump is winning more votes than he did in 2020.
In 2024, Trump received nearly 40% of votes already counted, compared to 34% in 2020. These numbers will continue to change as the count continues.
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In Riverside County, 49.6% of the ballots processed so far went toward Trump, compared to 45% in 2020.
Data from Orange County showed a similar trend with 48.9% of the votes counted so far were cast for Trump, compared to 44.4% in 2020.
Los Angeles County, largely made up of voters who identify themselves as Democrats, also show an increase in support for Trump as 33.5% of the votes as of Friday went toward Trump, compared to 26.8% four years ago.
But while Trump has a larger percentage of the vote, it does not mean he got more individual votes. And that’s largely blamed for an “enthusiasm gap” and lower voter turnout, according to Dr. Fernando Guerra of Loyola Marymount University and NBC4 Election Analyst.
“It appears that it was mostly amongst people who previously voted for Biden and are not coming out and not voting for Harris, so it's not so much that Donald Trump is getting more votes,” Guerra said. “As a matter of fact he's getting about the same amount of votes that he got in 2020. It's that Harris is getting a lot less votes than Biden got.”
Los Angeles County’s voter turnout appears to have dropped by 10% from 2020 when analyzing the number of ballots counted and still unprocessed.
Guerra also speculated that because California isn’t a battleground state, neither candidate focused their attention, which could have contributed to voter apathy.
“Part of it is that people decided I cannot vote for Trump but I'm not enthusiastic about Harris, either. That's a conjecture I don't have the data for, but that's one hypothesis that explains what occurred this week on Tuesday,” Guerra said.
