America’s housing crisis isn’t just reshaping where Americans live — experts say it’s reshaping how some vote.
Many of the counties that swung most dramatically toward Donald Trump on Election Day were also among America’s toughest housing markets, according to an analysis of election returns and the NBC News Home Buyer Index. And while voters picked Trump for a variety of reasons, these counties shifted further right than much of the rest of the country.
Across the country Tuesday, counties moved toward Trump by a median of 3.1 percentage points compared to the 2020 election. But in the top 10% of counties ranked most difficult for buying a home, the median shift was 4.5 percentage points. And nearly a third of these counties settled their races by just over a point, meaning real estate woes turned these counties into political flash points.
And it wasn’t just Republican counties voting even more strongly for Republicans. Multiple battleground states — Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania — were home to dozens of these struggling markets.“This was economics,” said Robert Shapiro, a political science professor at Columbia University, who added that the financial challenges Americans face could have cost Democrats the election.
“Voters were feeling economic hardship to an extent that was not fully appreciated by the Democrats, by the administration — the Harris campaign picked up on it, but it was too little, too late,” Shapiro said….
