When governors Gavin Newsom and Ron DeSantis held their “debate” this past November, one minor fact missing from the discussion was that donors in “the Golden State” have actually led the nation in supporting Donald Trump’s re-election campaign so far. Data from the Federal Election Commission shows that since August 2022 – September 2023, Californians have made at least 167,000 donations for the 2024 presidential election, $6.2 million of which has gone to the former president. Texan donors came in second for Trump over the last year at $5 million, while Floridians placed third for him at $4.6 million. New Yorkers, by contrast, contributed little more than $1.7 million to Trump, who himself is a former New Yorker. Trump first announced his intention to run for a second presidential term in November 2022.
In 2020, 23 of 58 counties in California went to Trump, including Kern, Shasta, El Dorado, and Placer counties, or where the state is far more rural than Hollywood and San Francisco still lead many to imagine. Trump tallied over 6 million votes from California that year, or more than any Republican candidate in state history. This also helps to explain why even though Trump lost areas like Orange County, there was still growth in support for him through certain segments of it, including in Asian-American and Latino communities there.
Still, $6 million from Trump voters in California during the past year does not mean the state as a whole is friendly to his camp. Instead, it’s indicative of an energized California Republican electorate early in the race, one that is bound to be outmatched at a rate of 2 to 1 by California’s Democratic supporters as the U.S. inches closer to November 2024. Yet the volume of donations from Trump voters across the state over the last year are consistent with California’s towering economic weight going into the 2020 election as well.
At that time, the nation’s most populous state led the nation with presidential campaign contributions at more than $290 million. New York came in second at $141 million, while Texas and Florida doled out $109 million and $103 million, respectively; of dollars from California for Biden or Trump in 2020, more than 3/4ths went to the Democrat.
But where exactly does all this money go?
To the “swing-states,” of course! In the form of television and radio ads, not to mention text messages and social media. This is because the electoral college system, which is a winner-take-all system in which just 51% of a state’s popular vote awards the state to any given candidate, makes it so hundreds of millions of dollars from California or Texas just support Biden or Trump landing slim majorities in a few swing-state counties. As the Washington Post noted recently:
“Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who won the 2016 popular vote by 2.9 million votes, or 2 percent, could have won the electoral college if about 80,000 people in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin had voted differently. In 2020, about 45,000 votes in Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin could have changed the outcome of that race, even though Joe Biden won the popular vote by more than 7 million.”
In summer 2023, then, the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics noted that given the last few election cycles and which states were won by a slim majority for the Democratic or Republican candidate, there are likely just four states to watch for 51% going to Trump or Biden in 2024:
“The four Toss-ups are Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin — the three closest states in 2020 — along with Nevada, which has voted Democratic in each of the last four presidential elections but by closer margins each time (it is one of the few states where Joe Biden did worse than Hillary Clinton, albeit by less than a tenth of a percentage point).”
In all likelihood, then, those $6 million for Trump from California’s red counties are pouring down in counties throughout Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin and Nevada. According to the Washington Post, outreach in some of these areas is already focusing on “Black, Latino, and young and female voters.” But to appreciate how much the electoral college system undermines California voters for the presidency, consider that even if the entire population of all four of these swing-states were suddenly combined, the Grizzly bear state would still have nearly 13 million more people to count for taxation and representation.
The Center for Politics also noted that Pennsylvania and North Carolina may also be in the mix in 2024. And it’s key to underline that the Center’s report was published prior to the brutal conflict in Palestine and Israel this fall, which has definitely diminished support for Biden from certain swing-state voters who chose him over Trump in 2020. Nowhere has this been more pronounced than in Minnesota and Michigan, where key swathes of Muslim and Arab American communities are now determined to deny Biden a second term.
For those wondering how Q3’s donations to Trump from California worked out locally, in the city of Los Angeles, out of just over 4,600 donations to presidential campaigns, there was an overwhelming sum of donations to Republican challengers for the office over the last year. But a division between donations to Republican alternatives to Trump and Trump himself reflected the dilemma for the GOP nationally. For example, 842 of donations from this set netted $507,000 for Joe Biden, while just over 1,300 donations from the same set provided nearly $900,000 for Republicans like Chris Christie, Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley, and Vivek Ramaswamy, among others.
By contrast, while Trump garnered just over $200,000 from the city of Los Angeles over the last year, he did so from more than 2,300 donations, which will also shift soon given his growing lead over the pack during this fall season. For the record, about 162 donations from this L.A. set also went to third-party and long-shot candidates such as Cornel West and Marianne Williamson.
Want to guess how many donations for Trump or Biden sailed out from 90210, or the Beverly Hills area zip code?
Naturally, this is a developing story. To get the scoop on Q4’s reports and hear more, be sure you’re subscribed to J.T. the L.A. Storyteller!
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