Did your county back Trump more this time than in 2020?

By Jeremia Kimelman | CALmatters No Republican presidential candidate has won California since George H.W. Bush made it five in a row for the GOP in 1988. So it’s no big surprise that Democratic nominee Kamala Harris easily won California’s 54 electoral votes this November. But while the vice president defeated Donald Trump 58.5% to 38%, she did much worse in her home Golden State than Joe Biden did in 2020: She lost vote share in all but one of the state’s 58 counties (including several with sizable Latino populations), and she lost at least 10 percentage points of the vote in 43 counties. Statewide, Harris won more than 1.8 million fewer votes than Biden’s 11.1 million — a main reason why Trump is headed toward winning the national popular vote. Harris got more votes — 3 — than Biden in a single county: Alpine, the state’s least populous county, with only about 1,500 residents. Trump lost one vote in that county. With the statewide count virtually complete before today’s deadline for counties to certify their results, the returns show that more voters didn’t vote at all: Nearly 90% of counties reported fewer total votes for president in last month’s...