In the 2024 presidential election, voters in Imperial County narrowly chose Donald Trump over Kamala Harris.
It was the first time since 1988 the county voted for a Republican candidate for president.
Compared to 2020, Trump increased his vote share in Imperial County by 25 percentage points. Four years ago, Biden beat Trump by 24 points; Trump won by one point in 2024.
This year saw the pendulum swing back in the other direction.
The majority of voters in Imperial County cast a "yes" vote on Prop 50, which state Democrats sold as a referendum on the Trump administration. "Yes" votes beat out the opposition by 19 points. The shift in Imperial County from 2024 to 2025 was the largest among California's 58 counties, a KPBS analysis found.
Bryan Vega, the 27-year-old chair of the Imperial County Democratic Party, attributes this in part to a renewed focus on building connections with the community. That’s an effort he said started when he was elected to the position in January of 2025.
“We were not aligned because we had — we had lost the plot,” Vega said about the Democratic party at large. “Politics was really being handled at a level where it was more transactional and it wasn't centered around community.”
Vega said the first thing he set out to do was reorient the party around these principles — which meant building the party "from the ground up," he said. Even before Prop 50, the party held town halls to discuss the impact that the Trump administration would have on Imperial County.
A push to bring the party back down to the community level was also a main focus for the San Diego County Democratic Party ahead of Prop 50.
That effort to reach and listen to voters on the ground can make a big difference, according to Adam Ekins, an adjunct instructor of political science at Imperial Valley College.
“People want to feel like someone is listening to them and cares about their situation. And I think (to) a lot of people, rightfully or not, the Democrats have become a bit more seen as an elitist party, college educated white folks,” Ekins said.
Vega expressed similar concerns.
“We have left the party identity up for interpretation," he said. "So what we have to do now is kind of go out there and mend a lot of the relationships — and like, we are the working party, we are the people's party."
Ekins said many people voted for Trump because of the economy and what he promised to do about rising prices.
“People seemed to believe Trump when he said that, you know, he could fix the economy, that Biden had let in millions of immigrants and screwed everything up and that it was going to be easy to fix,” Ekins said.
A year into the Trump administration, those promises have fallen flat, according to Ekins, and voters in Imperial County are returning to what he considers the left-leaning norm.
“You know, the fact of the matter is, people do vote based on vibes, more than based on data,” Ekins said. “It's very unscientific of me to say so, but you can feel how different the vibe is now than it was a year ago.”
Both San Bernardino and Riverside counties also flipped from voting for Trump in 2024 to voting "yes" on Prop 50 in 2025. Every county in California that voted for Kamala Harris in 2024 voted "yes" on Prop 50 in 2025.
The California Republican Party and the Republican Party of Imperial County did not respond to requests for comment.
