How Graying America’s Politics and Culture Are Changing

One of the truest rules in American politics over the past 20 years is rural communities are red communities — that is rural communities tend to vote Republican at election time. That was true in 2024 as well. AP VoteCast found President Donald Trump won 63% of the vote in rural places.

But hidden in the data was a subtler finding in the counties the American Communities Project calls Graying America. Those 396 counties voted Republican and by a larger margin than they did in 2020, but there was a collection of them that moved the other way — where Trump got a smaller share of the vote in 2024 than he did in 2020.

Overall, Trump had a very good election. He only saw his vote percentage shrink in about 8% of all the counties in the United States. But Trump saw his percentage of the vote drop in 19% of the nation’s Graying American counties, 74 counties that might be thought of as vacationland communities.

The counties where Trump saw those dips tell a larger story about population shifts in the United States in the 2020s. And you can see the changes up close in Leelanau County, a small spit of land that makes up the “pinkie finger” of Michigan’s mitten.

Pretty Towns On The Lake

Leelanau County is the definition of a vacation community. It is rolling hills of orchards and vineyards interspersed with green fields of hops growing on vines. Lake Michigan sits on both sides of the peninsula, providing views of deep blue water — with plenty of restaurants, cafes, and wineries lining the roads and the shores.

For years it has been where people from metro Chicago or metro Detroit seek a summer respite in Sutton’s Bay or Leland or other pretty towns on the lake. But over the past few years, things have changed in the place.

In 2000, Leelanau’s population was 21,236. In 2020, it was 21,692. That’s a difference of 456 people or 2% in 19 years. But by 2023, the population had grown to 23,019, an increase of more than 6% in just four years.

Those new residents brought other changes. The median household income for the county went from about $73,000 in 2019 to about $92,000 in 2023 — a $19,000 increase. The national median household income number was about $80,600 in 2023. The percentage of the population with a bachelor’s degree went from about 45% to roughly 50%. The national figure is about 36%.

In short, Leelanau is still quaint and picturesque, but its population increasingly looks more like an urban environment, or in the eyes of the ACP, more like an Urban Suburb — well-educated and wealthier.

And as that has happened the county’s politics have shifted, somewhat dramatically.

Trump won Leelanau by about three points in 2016 on his way to carrying Michigan. In 2020, Joe Biden won the county by about five points in 2020, when he won the state. In November, Democrat Kamala Harris won Leelanau by about eight points, even as the state went to Trump.

Post-Covid in Graying America

Leelanau is not a complete an outlier in this case, but part of a population trend. In Michigan, there were seven counties where Trump did worse in 2024 than he did in 2020 (again, even as he flipped the state). All seven of them sit on the Great Lakes shoreline and are growing faster than the state (which is losing population), and five of them are in the ACP’s Graying American type.

And this trend in Graying America stretches beyond Michigan. In Wisconsin, Adams (home of the Dells) and Door (across the lake from Leelanau) counties both saw Trump’s percentage fall slightly. So did Lincoln County in Oregon, out on the Pacific Ocean. And so did Transylvania County, North Carolina, near Asheville.

What’s happening? One driving factor is early retirees and remote workers, including people visiting for a few weeks or a month in the summer, have moved in. Covid-19, which pushed people away from crowded areas and into more rural ones, seems to have opened the door to people settling into their “getaway” locales more permanently.

It’s hard to say if the trend will continue, but if it does, there are potential impacts, politically and otherwise.

First off, of course, in a political environment where a win or a loss can be determined by a few thousand votes, these moves could swing elections over time, particularly if the new residents come from other states. If you pull enough Chicagoans out of Chicago into Leelanau, that could matter — and the same is true for other counties in this group. Although, to be clear, Graying America is still heavily Republican in its voting patterns.

But, maybe more important, if these trends continue, we could see bigger changes in sparsely populated parts of the country, many of which have been losing population.

These communities are already becoming urban outposts in rural locales, bringing more of a city sensibility to places that have not been that way in the past. And if these places multiply and their populations grow, they could have larger spin-off effects, bringing in new businesses and more people, and creating a new kind of urban/rural living for a small subset of Americans.

It’s still far too early to say anything definitive. It’s not clear how much of these changes were fueled by responses to Covid. But hidden in these data could be evidence of the seeds of a new kind of American community with a distinct populace, economy, and culture.