Yes, many Chicago voters swung to the right in this election, but more of them did not show up to vote blue.
A large portion of the doubling of support for Trump in Chicago was due to a stunning decline in Democratic voter turnout rather than an increase in the number of Trump voters, a WBEZ analysis found.
Citywide, former President Donald Trump saw nearly 16,000 votes more than in 2020, but Vice President Kamala Harris' vote total was more than 205,000 votes behind President Joe Biden in 2020.
“The real story is that fewer people are voting and Trump got the same number of votes in 2024 than he did in 2020,” said Delmarie Cobb, a Democratic political and media consultant.
The city's overall voter turnout — 65.02% as of Friday — was the second-lowest in a presidential general election since 1944. In that span, citywide turnout has only once dipped below that level — 63.17% in 1996.
The sharp decline in voter turnout, especially in areas of the city that reliably vote blue, shows that a large number of Democrats who stayed home in this election played an important role in Chicago's shift to the right this year.
Voter turnout was lowest in the most Democratic parts of the city, communities where Biden and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton won more than 90% of the vote in 2020 and 2016, according to a WBEZ analysis.
Election boundaries were redrawn after the 2020 Census, so, in order to compare results between election years, WBEZ assigned precinct-level votes and total registered voters to 77 community district boundaries based on the amount of geographic area overlap between precincts and communities.
Where did the democratic backsliding happen in Chicago?
Harris lost more votes than Biden got four years ago than Trump got in all but one of Chicago's community districts.
But this decline in votes cast for Democrats was more pronounced in majority-Black communities.
Cobb believes that's because a lot of black voters skipped this election, not because they voted for Trump.
“What Democrats fail to understand…is that they believe black voters have nowhere else to go. What they don't understand is that when we feel like we have nowhere else to go, we go nowhere. We don't vote. “So, it's not that we vote Republican, it's that we don't vote,” Cobb said.
“Most black people know that Donald Trump is not for them. “His policies are not right for us,” Cobb said. “The majority of people who didn't go out to vote didn't do so because they stayed home, and the point of that was to make a statement to Democrats that, you know, we're disgusted by all of this.”
Cobb said Democrats failed to provide the necessary messaging to motivate their supporters to participate and vote.
“Part of the reason (Black voters) are disgusted by this is because they don’t know the full story,” she said. “They didn't hear the Democratic side of the story.”
The decline in Democratic votes also occurred in communities where Trump's share of the vote appears to have increased the most.
Several majority-Latino communities saw the largest increases in Trump's share of the vote.
For example, Trump's share of the vote rose the most in South Lawndale, known as The Little Village, where his support doubled from 12% in 2020 to 30% in 2024.
But these areas also saw a significant decline in the number of votes cast for Harris compared to votes for Biden in 2020 and Clinton in 2016.
In South Lawndale, Trump received about 1,400 votes compared to four years ago. On the other hand, Harris received 5,000 fewer votes there than Biden.
Amy Chen is a data reporter for WBEZ. Follow her at @amyqin12.
