These former Obama strongholds sealed the election for Trump

Results as of 7 a.m. Wednesday. Dark gray areas did not have enough data.

Donald Trump delivered on his promise to flip the Democrats’ electoral hold on the industrial Midwest.

Across swing states — and others previously thought to be safe for Democrats — Trump colored dozens of counties red that hadn’t gone Republican in decades.

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Of the nearly 700 counties that twice sent Obama to the White House, a stunning one-third flipped to support Trump.

Trump also won 194 of the 207 counties that voted for Obama either in 2008 or 2012.

By contrast, of those 2,200 counties that never supported Obama, Clinton was only able to win six. That’s just 0.3 percent crossover to the Democratic side.

Clinton had more opportunities to peel counties from the Republicans. Historically, Democrats rely on few (but very populous) counties to chart a path to victory. Republicans, by contrast, draw support from a wide swath of many more rural and suburban counties.

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Despite having a smaller field of possible counties to win over, Trump did just that, delivering electoral votes in the Upper Midwest states, as well as in Florida and North Carolina.

Trump secured several Obama counties in upstate New York, though it wasn’t enough to win the state. He also won over counties in Maine’s rural congressional 2nd District, securing a GOP electoral vote in New England for the first time since 2000.

The Obama-Trump voter

Who are these voters who picked the nation’s current president twice and now its president-elect, who rocketed to political prominence questioning Obama’s legitimacy?

On average, the counties that voted for Obama twice and then flipped to support Trump were 81 percent white. Obama strongholds that supported Clinton were just 55 percent white.

Of the counties that split their vote in 2008 and 2012, Trump’s were 86 percent white and Clinton’s were 71 percent white.

There was also an education gap, with Trump pulling more support from counties with more voters with a only a high school education. In Trump’s counties, 36 percent of voters had no college education, on average. In the consistently Democratic counties, only 28 percent of voters were not college educated.

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Why it mattered

The Obama-Trump counties were critical in delivering electoral victories for Trump. Many of them fall in states that supported Obama in 2012, but Trump in 2016. In all, these flipped states accounted for 83 electoral votes. (Michigan and New Hampshire could add to this total, but their results were not finalized as of 4 p.m. Wednesday.)

Note: Trump also won Maine’s congressional 2nd District, which earned him one electoral vote. Dark gray areas did not have enough data. Alaska is not included because it does not report data at the county level. Results as of 7 a.m. Wednesday.

Source: AP.