Voters in Imperial County narrowly chose Donald Trump over Kamala Harris this past November, the first time the county has backed a Republican presidential candidate in more than 30 years.
The final election results showed President-elect Trump emerging with 49% of the vote compared to Vice President Harris’s 48% — a razor-thin lead of fewer than 500 votes.
It was a narrow but stunning loss for the Democratic Party. Imperial County is a working class farming region, where most people identify as Latino and voters have backed Democratic presidential candidates for decades. The last time the county chose a Republican candidate was George H. W. Bush in 1988.
The results haven’t changed California’s overall standing as a deep-blue state, but they do fit into a broader swell of support that the Republican Party saw in 2024.
Imperial County was one of 10 California counties that flipped from blue to red as Trump vowed to impose sweeping tariffs and bring down the cost of living while demonizing immigrants and communities of color. That was despite warnings from Trump’s critics, including a number of former allies, who said he met the definition of a fascist and would threaten democracy in the United States.
In previous elections, Trump lost Imperial County by wide margins. In 2016, he brought in just 26% of votes in the county compared to Hilary Clinton’s 67%. In 2020, Joe Biden won with 61% of the vote, while Trump brought in just 37%.
But last year, the president-elect increased his share of votes dramatically from 37% in 2020 to 49% in 2024. It was one of the biggest swings toward Trump in the state, Calmatters reported.
Some experts say the election results in Imperial County reflect broader worries about rising grocery prices and other costs.
“I would attribute the shift towards Trump in Imperial County to the same factors that caused that shift elsewhere: concern about high prices and the economy,” wrote Adam Ekins, an adjunct instructor of political science at Imperial Valley College, in an email to KPBS. “We’ve seen center left governments everywhere losing out to more extreme parties and candidates as a result of the public backlash against the high prices.”
Others warned against reading the results as the sign of a deep shift in the region’s political views.
In an opinion for the Los Angeles Times, newly-elected Brawley Mayor Gil Rebolar argued the election results were ultimately a sign that many voters in Imperial County feel abandoned by both parties.
Carlos Bolivar, a resident of the city of Imperial, said he was surprised by both national and local election results.
A registered Republican, Bolivar crossed party lines to vote for Harris after hearing Trump’s statements about being a dictator on his first day in office.
But Bolivar said the results did make some sense to him when it came to bias against Harris. Some Imperial Valley residents, he said, were still resistant to the idea of a woman of color being president.
“We’re one of the last developed countries to not have gone in that direction,” he said. “If a person was able to open their eyes and look beyond that and look at the qualifications, you should have had a different turnout.”
Bolivar said the election has left him apprehensive about what Trump’s victory means for the country. Now though, he said, all he can do is wait and see what happens.
