Democratic victories in the South this year were driven just as much by who showed up to vote as who stayed home, according to an NPR analysis of turnout data.
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Midterm elections normally have lower voter participation than presidential contests. But from Louisiana to the Carolinas, counties that voted for former Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024 came closer to matching — and in some cases exceeding — presidential turnout. At the same time, counties won by President Trump saw a much sharper decline in turnout and fewer Republican votes.
In six southern states — Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina — turnout dropped by 19% in Harris-won counties compared to 26% in Trump-won counties. (In Louisiana, counties are called parishes).
Across the South, the six states analyzed swung an average of 22 points towards Democrats, larger than the national swing of about 14.5 points.
This differential turnout was a key factor in Democrats flipping Senate seats in North Carolina, South Carolina and Mississippi, and contributed to the closer-than-expected margin in Louisiana's Senate race.
In Mississippi, Democrat Scott Colom outperformed Harris, earning roughly 8,100 more votes than she did in 2024. Colom's margin over incumbent Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith is just over 5,600 votes as final ballots are being tallied.
Democratic Senate nominees in those six states earned more raw votes than Harris in 170 counties. On the flip side, the Republican nominees garnered hundreds of thousands fewer votes than Trump.
Black voters showed up
In special elections and primaries leading up to the midterms, voting data and polls showed a surge in Black voter participation, spurred in part by a Supreme Court decision that gutted part of the Voting Rights Act.
The Louisiana v. Callais decision led to changed congressional maps across the South, including Tennessee, Alabama, Louisiana and North Carolina. After redrawing boundary lines in a way that aimed to elect an 11-3 Republican majority delegation, North Carolina Democrats are now on track to hold an 11-3 majority.
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Majority-Black counties overall had a higher voter turnout with about 85% compared to 76% for white, non-Hispanic majority counties. Sixteen majority-Black counties had more Democratic votes than during the 2024 election, with 12 of them in Mississippi. Clay County, Miss., had the largest voter turnout increase — by 17 points from 2024 to 2026.
Beyond majority-Black turnout, Democratic candidates in these southern states benefitted from a smaller drop in turnout from the 2024 election.
In Georgia, Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff finished with roughly 79,000 fewer votes than former Vice President Kamala Harris won in the state two years prior, despite there being more than a million fewer total votes overall.
All 159 counties in Georgia shifted towards Democrats. Ossoff flipped a dozen of them, including suburban Fayette County, on the way to a 14 point victory.
South Carolina had some of the largest Democratic voter turnout, with Greenville, Spartanburg, and Lexington counties having the largest increases in raw Democratic votes from the 2024 election. Greenville, which backed Trump by 20 points two years ago, flipped to support Sen.-elect Annie Andrews by about two points.
Republicans voters did not
Nowhere was the Republican drop off more stark than in North Carolina, where former Gov. Roy Cooper flipped the Senate race by a 20 point margin. Former Republican National Committee Chair Michael Whatley earned 1.25 million fewer votes than Trump did when he carried the state in 2024, a roughly 43% drop in GOP support.
No county or parish across these southern states came close to matching Trump 2024 vote totals. The lowest drop off came in Greene County, Ga. with 83%, the only one of 518 counties where Republicans earned more than 80% of Trump's 2024 raw votes.
The largest drop off came in North Carolina, which saw only two-thirds of the Republican votes they did in 2024. Wake and Mecklenburg counties, home to the two largest cities — Raleigh and Charlotte — saw the biggest drops, with about 100,000 and 90,000 fewer GOP voters respectively.
Atlanta and its suburbs also saw a notable decline in support for Republicans, with Fulton, Gwinnett, Cobb, DeKalb and Cherokee counties losing between 35,000 and 77,000 GOP votes each. Democrats saw smaller losses in those areas, with slight gains in votes for Gwinnett and Cherokee counties.
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