Left-behind counties have left behind Democrats

Heading into 2024, America’s left-behind counties had just enjoyed their best three years of job growth and business creation this century. And when EIG first revealed this remarkable trend back in July, the Biden administration touted our findings at the start of a White House press briefing.

But if Democrats were hoping that the impressive post-pandemic recovery of these counties would also win their votes, they would soon be disappointed. The 2024 election has once again cemented the GOP’s dominance in these long-struggling parts of the country — a geographic dominance that has expanded, as we document below, almost without interruption since 2008. 

We define left-behind counties as those that experienced less than half the national population and median household income growth rates between 2000 and 2016. These counties have largely been disconnected from the national economic story for a prolonged period of time — often stretching back decades. The 972 counties that meet this definition are home to 59 million people, or roughly 18 percent of the national population.

Their economic recovery from the COVID-19 recession was starkly different from the tepid growth, which lasted nearly a decade, following the Great Recession of 2008–09. 

But there’s more to the story of their post-pandemic recovery. Although jobs and businesses returned to left-behind counties, other parts of the United States did even better — meaning that left-behind places, despite their impressive growth, kept falling even further behind everywhere else in the country. 

Furthermore, job growth and business creation are not the only two indicators that matter. Thanks to spiking inflation in the first two years of the Biden Administration, real median household income in left-behind counties was actually lower in 2022 (the most recent year for which we have data) than it was before the pandemic in 2019. 

A worse outcome — depressed economic activity and widespread job losses — may have been avoided, but that’s a counterfactual that nobody experienced. What families in left-behind counties did experience was a declining standard of living, at least when measured by real income. 

How were all these trends reflected in the voting booth? 

After a presidential campaign heavily defined by voters' frustration with the economy, Donald Trump is on track to claim a record share of left-behind counties, improving on his 2020 performance. The once and future president won 86 percent of the 907 of the left-behind counties whose results have been officially tallied.

A number of left-behind countries flipped from voting for Biden in 2020 to voting for Trump this year. Not a single one has flipped from Trump four years ago to Harris in 2024.

While Trump dominated the overall left-behind landscape, the types of left-behind places where he and Harris did best look quite different. 

The denser the county, the better Harris performed. Trump captured 91 percent of rural left-behind counties, while Harris won an equal share of large urban ones. The closest split was in suburban counties, which went 53–47 to Harris.

Voters in the 2024 election also continued another existing trend. In every presidential election since 2000, left-behind counties won by the Democratic candidate have had higher average real wages than those won by the Republican candidate.

As recently as 2008, Democrats were able to carry fully one-third of left-behind counties at the voting booth. That share has been cut by more than half. Four years from now, will the Republicans capture even more of these counties — or will Democrats finally start reversing this seemingly inexorable trend?