(Bloomberg) -- Donald Trump’s November election victory has often been explained as a reflection of anger about post-pandemic price increases for everything from groceries to housing.
But inflation was only part of the economic story. Trump won in the places that have seen the slowest growth since the pandemic, according to county-level GDP data released in December by the US Bureau of Economic Analysis.
The figures, which capture output for 2023, also point to some of the challenges that the president-elect will face as his administration takes over management of the economy and sets about rewriting government regulations, tariffs and tax policy.
Here are some key takeaways from a Bloomberg News analysis of the data.
Harris won the US’s biggest economic engines.
Democrat Kamala Harris won by a landslide the counties that are the biggest components of the US economy — places that have on average roared back from the pandemic recession. She took 83 of the 100 largest counties by real GDP. Those 100 counties together account for more than half of US output.
That split largely reflects the urban-rural economic divide in America that has also become a political one. Still, Trump made big gains in this subset of counties, even as he lost them. The Republican gained an average 5.8 percentage points over his 2020 result in those largest 100 counties. That is greater than the 3.5-point average shift to Trump seen across counties nationwide.
The communities most exposed to manufacturing voted for Trump, despite Biden’s push.
The US overall draws 10% of its GDP from manufacturing. But many counties are more dependent on the sector than that. Trump won 1,308 of the 1,463 counties that have a greater reliance on manufacturing than the US as a whole. The average growth in those places between 2019 and 2023 was around 7%. That recovery was boosted in part by President Joe Biden’s industrial policy, but was still slower than in counties nationwide, which grew 8.4% over that time.
That doesn’t tell the whole story, though. Larger counties with big manufacturing economies have done much better economically since the pandemic and still went to Trump. That suggests Trump’s resonance in these places isn’t just about how the economy felt on the ground during the Biden administration, but rather reflects a broader divide between Trump-supporting blue-collar America and the college-educated white-collar voters that embraced Harris.
Trump won big in places slow to recover from the pandemic.
Across the US, almost 30 million people live in the 650 counties with local economies that had not recovered to their pre-pandemic real GDP at the end of 2023. Trump won 576 of them. On average, those slow-recovery counties that went for Trump had economies that were still 6.6% smaller at the end of 2023 than at the end of 2019, just before the Covid-19 pandemic. Those were often smaller counties by both GDP and population.
One of the big stories of the 2024 election was the broad shift toward Trump, with the billionaire finding greater appeal with a wide range of demographic groups. The places that swung hardest to him in the election saw slower growth than in counties nationwide, perhaps a hint that there were economic factors beyond inflation helping propel voters in his direction.
The combined output of counties won by Harris is larger than in those won by Trump.
If you were to combine the more than 2,600 counties won by Trump into one country, their inflation-adjusted economic output would total $8.1 trillion. That’s nothing to sniff at, but the comparable Harris economy would be far larger. The Harris economy had a real GDP of $13.6 trillion — bigger than those of Germany, Japan and India combined.
Counties that supported Harris accounted for more than 60% of US GDP adjusted for inflation at the end of 2023, according to the BEA data.
Trump won the corners of the economy that depend on government most.
One of Trump’s big promises for his next term is to rein in Big Government. He’s appointed the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, and Vivek Ramaswamy to lead a new Department of Government Efficiency meant to identify places for cuts and savings.
They’ll face at least one inconvenient reality in that task: Benefits like Social Security and Medicare account for a large portion of government spending, and the places that depend on them most overwhelmingly voted for Trump.
Trump won almost eight in 10 of the counties in the US in which residents drew more than 40% of their collective income from government benefits in 2022, according to a Bloomberg analysis of election results and data compiled by the Economic Innovation Group, a Washington think tank.
Trump promised during the campaign that he wouldn’t touch Social Security or Medicare. As more Baby Boomers retire, they’re drawing on benefits that have long been seen as politically sacrosanct.
The question for the Trump administration is whether it will continue to treat those benefits as untouchable if doing so bumps up against its plans for cuts — and what that would mean for Trump’s party the next time voters go to the ballot box.
Methodology: The Bloomberg News analysis matched BEA county-level GDP data with election results and US Census population data. Because of peculiarities and changes in how data are reported, it does not include Alaska, Hawaii, counties in Connecticut and portions of Virginia where the BEA tracks GDP by merging independent cities and counties.
--With assistance from Gregory Korte.
©2025 Bloomberg L.P.