Trump’s 2024 Surprise Record California Vote & Looking Ahead at 2025

The 2024 November election in California was a surprise plus this year, with even the national party taken aback by how much the party grew in California. While there were some losses, such as the GOP losing a few close House seats by only hundreds of votes, there were a surprising number of wins.

For the first time in decades, both the Assembly and state Senate saw GOP growth. Even the number of conservative favored propositions were higher than normal.  They managed to flip Assembly seats for the first time in a Presidential election year since 1992 and pass numerous favored Propositions such as the tougher on crime Prop 36. And in the Senate, the state saw the first presidential year Senate seat flip since 1980. Even some of the losses were wins, with Steve Garvey having the highest GOP vote total for a Senate candidate since 2010.

But the big one was the presidential election. With vote totals now in, Trump received 38.3%, or 6.08 million votes, to Harris’ 58.5%, or 9.2 million votes. It seems like a big gap, until you look at previous elections. Trump had his best result in the Golden state ever in 2024, putting him above his 34% performance in California in 2020 and well above the 31% he got in California against Hillary Clinton in 2016. He also surpassed Mitt Romney’s 37% total in 2012, as well as McCain’s 37% in 2008. To find the last time a GOP candidate did better than Trump, one would have to go back to the 2004 election, when George Bush got 44% of the vote in California. This also puts him only 3 points behind Bush’s 2000 election performance in California with 41% of the vote and on par with how well Bob Dole did in 1996, when he also got 38%.

It was also the most votes ever for a Republican candidate in state history. A lot of factors were in play there. Latino voters moving toward the right was huge, but so was Republican party registration gains. In fact, the CAGOP and Fix California made huge gains throughout the year, while CADEM lost many registered voters. The number of registered Democrats still outweighs Republicans in the state, but the GOP has massively grown. Since 2019, the GOP added over 750,000 registered Republicans to voter rolls, including nearly 100,000 in the first half of 2024 alone.

And Republicans noticed. Trump has remarked several times that California saw the highest number of votes for a GOP candidate ever in the state. And, like many incoming presidents before him, he didn’t forget them, as many Californians are joining his administrations, with some even finding their way to the cabinet. Robert Kennedy Jr. is up for Health and Human Services secretary. Ric Grenell, who founded Fix California and was an ambassador to Germany under Trump, has been named special missions envoy. Trump even selected California attorney and former California Republican Party (CAGOP) Vice Chairwoman Harmeet Dhillon as the next Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights.

The California GOP rise

And while it is more of a broad general policy, Trump has also zeroed in on California on many issues. This includes local water access issues for farmers, elimination of electric car credits, promising to do away with California’s 2035 electric car sale mandate, increased border action, and increased illegal immigration control to just name a few.

“Trump knows just how large California’s economy is and knows how important the state really is,” said Stephanie Lewis, a pollster in Southern California, to the Globe on Monday. “Yes, make all your California is terrible jokes you want, but numbers don’t lie. California is incredibly important to the country with agriculture, as a vast majority of winter produce comes from here. The economy is the fifth largest in the world. There is still a lot of industry, shipping, tech, and so much more out here. This isn’t doom him coming in. From a purely economic perspective, he doesn’t want to punish the state or anything like that. He’s just looking to bring them back to federal guidelines and be more productive.

“This is how it has been polling. A lot of Californians have concerns with his social policy and the changes he wants. Immigration is a big one. But, besides the tariff issue, people generally seem to be okay with his economic policies out here. People want good paying jobs. This is actually a paradox with many Democratic voters, because they bash him on social and environmental issues, but then are ok with all the economic success that follows.

“I would agree though that Trump’s performance in the election was, while maybe not a surprise, but a pleasant bump up over expectations. People said that 37% was the ceiling for him this year in California. We have polls to that effect. But he blew them away.”