65% of Butler County voters choose Trump in Tuesday’s presidential election
The campaigns for both presidential candidates took twists and turns throughout the 2024 general election cycle, with an attempted assassination shaking up former President Donald Trump’s campaign, and President Joe Biden dropping out of the race before endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee.
In the historically Republican-leaning county, Butler County’s Republican and Democratic committee leaders worked to unite their political bases around their respective candidates, bringing in a combined 119,193 votes for their presidential candidates.
Trump received 79,147 votes, or 65.61% of the vote, while Harris received 40,046 votes, or 33.20% of the vote, in Butler County, according to unofficial results from the Election Bureau on Tuesday, Nov. 5.
On Election Day, Trump received 64,294 votes at the polls while Harris received only 24,251 votes. The mail-in and absentee ballots for the candidates were closer in number with 14,853 for Trump and 15,795 for Harris.
Jim Hulings, chairman of the Butler County Republican Committee, said the group’s members registered about 3,000 voters this year, leading an even wider margin of Republican voters in the county compared to Democratic ones.
“Locally, we had an amazing turnout. We had a lot of young people, a lot of first-time voters,” Hulings said. “We were out door-knocking; we were doing more subtle things like trying to get registered voters, getting mail-in ballots.”
Catherine Lalonde, chairwoman of the Butler County Democratic Committee, said the shift from rallying support for Biden to Harris instead was an unexpected pivot, but one the committee flipped to as quickly as possible.
“It happened really quick, when Biden said he wasn't going to run and endorsed Kamala; it seemed unanimous, ‘Yes, we're going with that,’” Lalonde said. “It seems like even a couple months ago, a lot of enthusiasm for Kamala, a lot of younger women and mostly positive reactions to people wearing their campaign shirts and bumper stickers.”
According to Hulings, many of the Republican groups in Butler County are comprised of the same people, whom he called patriots.
“We were working with women's groups, and you see all the same people in the different ones,” Hulings said. “There's a nucleus of great patriots in Butler County.”
Lalonde said Butler County’s growth over the past four years has led the committee to reach out to more people than before, in hopes to increase voter turnout for Democratic voters. She said the goal of her committee was to get the message out about the Democratic platform.
“The fact that the population is bigger, people want to invest in voter turnout here because there's a lot more people,” Lalonde said. “I don't expect Kamala to win Butler County, but it's about getting more than we got before.”
