We’ve already examined Donald Trump’s 2024 gains across the city of Philadelphia, but did those trends carry over to the suburbs? They did. In this article, we will examine the maps from Montgomery and Delaware Counties, two Democratic strongholds that were a little less Democratic for Kamala Harris last month. (Chester and Bucks Counties will be discussed in a future article.)

The continuing party realignment in America has meant that wealthier, whiter suburbs are trending toward a Democratic Party that increasingly looks after their interests. That trend hit a small bump in the road in 2024, as Trump gained vote share in both Delaware and Montgomery Counties, though not by as much as he did in the nation as a whole.

Delaware County

Let’s start with Delaware County, which remained shockingly blue in the electoral map as Harris took 61.5 percent of the vote.

The densely populated boroughs near the Philadelphia border remained staunchly Democratic, as did Upper Darby township. Tiny Tinicum township (population: 3,983) retained its title as the most Republican municipality, with 63.1 percent of voters opting for the former (and future) president. Just a few miles away, Yeadon was the most Democratic area, with 92.5 percent voting for Harris.

This was all predictable before the election, so let’s look at the map showing the change in two-party vote share since 2020.

Here, we see the more general pro-Republican trend across the county that gave Trump 1.48 percentage points more of the two-party vote share than he won in 2020. In terms of raw vote, that translated to 4,782 more votes for Trump than he had last time, and 5,385 fewer votes for Harris than Joe Biden tallied four years ago.

It is tempting to chalk some of this change up to third party gains, but third parties and write-ins were actually down in Delco compared to 2020 — there were 629 fewer such votes this time around. Democrats can’t blame this one on Jill Stein.

But there is some evidence that left-leaning voters fled from Harris because of her moderate and muddled views on the Israeli-Gaza war. The Democrat’s greatest decline in vote share came in tiny Millbourne borough, where the majority South Asian community voted 14.78 percentage points more Republican than they did in 2020. As Delco’s smallest municipality, Millbourne did not have the people to swing the whole county that much into the purple, but it does provide a snapshot of what one ethnic enclave might think about the Democrats’ foreign policy. 

On the other hand, many of the deep-blue boroughs in the eastern county got even bluer, bucking the national and statewide trend. At the county’s western edge, though, we find the municipality where Democrats increased their share of votes the most: Lower Chichester was 3.31 percent more Democratic than when Biden ran.

Montgomery County

To the north of Philadelphia, in Montco, we see similar trends. The county has voted democratic at the presidential level since 1992, and this cycle was no different. But, again, there was a slight reversal on the march to the left as Trump fared 1.89 percentage points better than he did four years ago.

First, the raw numbers: Harris carried the county 61-39:

With the exception of the townships along the Bucks County line, the gradient is fairly consistent: the closer to Philadelphia, the more Democratic. Pottstown is the exception, being heavily Democratic even in the more conservative western end of the county. 

Again, the change map is more telling of the shifts under the surface.

Unlike in Delco, nearly every municipality in Montgomery County voted more Republican for president than it did in 2020.

Trump’s biggest gains were in the boroughs of Conshohoken (5.36 percentage points) and Hatfield (5.86, best in the county). The reasons here are likely similar to the reasons he gained in Philadelphia and New York City: an increasingly racially diverse, increasingly urban component to the Trump coalition. 

Meanwhile, the more spacious suburban townships of Upper Gwynedd and Whitpain were among the only bright spots for Harris. Her best growth came in rural Douglass Township, where she did 0.78 percentage points better than Biden. Overall, though, the drop in Democratic support in Montco was shallow, but pervasive.

One final Montgomery County note: in my pre-election article on bellwether regions, I suggested that Lower Pottsgrove, which had voted for Trump in 2016 and for Biden in 2020, might be a good microcosm of the state as a whole. As the map above shows, this was not the case. Lower Pottsgrove saw higher vote totals for both major parties, but ended up slightly more — 0.07 percentage points — in favor of the Democrats. It just goes to show that nothing stays the same in politics.

Kyle Sammin is the managing editor of Broad + Liberty.