The 2024 United States presidential election in Alabama took place on Tuesday, November 5, 2024, as part of the 2024 United States elections in which all 50 states plus the District of Columbia will participate. Alabama chose electors to represent them in the Electoral College via a popular vote. The state of Alabama has nine electoral votes in the Electoral College, following reapportionment due to the 2020 United States census in which the state neither gained nor lost a seat.
Alabama voted for the Republican nominee, Donald Trump, by a comfortable margin in the election, with him winning the state by 30.47%. This was the largest Republican win in the state since 1972, against the backdrop of Richard Nixon's 49-state landslide re-election. Prior to the election, all major news organizations marked Alabama a safe red state.
Turnout noticeably fell, with Harris receiving over 70,000 fewer votes than Biden, while Trump increased his raw vote total by over 20,000. Harris had the lowest vote share of any Democratic nominee in Alabama since 1972, slightly less than Hillary Clinton’s 34.36% in 2016.
Trump's best performance was in ancestrally Republican Winston County, while Harris's strongest performance was in Macon County, a rural, sparsely populated Black Belt county. Trump only flipped Marengo County, another Black Belt county that had not voted for a Republican since George W. Bush in 2004. Democrats have not won a presidential election in Alabama since 1976.
Primary elections
Democratic primary
The Alabama Democratic primary was held on Super Tuesday, March 5, 2024.
Republican primary
The Alabama Republican primary was held on Super Tuesday, March 5, 2024.
General election
On April 9, 2024, Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen informed the Democratic National Committee that state law would not permit certification in time to include President Biden on the November ballot, as the 2024 Democratic National Convention (DNC) was to take place days after the state deadline of August 15. The following month, legislation was approved extending the deadline to August 23, one day after the conclusion of the DNC, allowing Biden to appear on the ballot. In early August, after Vice President Kamala Harris replaced Biden in the race, Democrats held a virtual convention to nominate Harris, a process then formalized at the DNC convention. The day after the convention's conclusion, the Alabama Democratic Party filed paperwork to ensure Harris's inclusion on the Alabama ballot in November.
Voting laws
A study by the Center for Election Innovation & Research in July 2024 found that Alabama is one of only three remaining states (along with Mississippi and New Hampshire) to offer no early in-person voting option for the 2024 general election. The state also requires an eligible reason to vote by mail.
In August 2024, Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen announced a process for purging 3,251 registered Alabama voters and referred them to the state attorney general’s office for criminal prosecution. In September 2024, the Department of Justice sued Alabama for violating the National Voter Registration Act. In October 2024, district judge Anna Manasco ruled in favor of the Department of Justice, ordering the state to restore the voter registrations. Alabama secretary of state’s chief of staff Clay Helms testified that 2,000 of the purged voters were legally registered citizens.
Early voting
A study by the Center for Election Innovation & Research in July 2024 found that Alabama is one of only three remaining states (along with Mississippi and New Hampshire) to offer no early in-person voting option for the 2024 general election. The state also requires an eligible reason to vote by mail.
Results
Counties that flipped from Democratic to Republican
- Marengo (largest city: Demopolis)
By congressional district
Trump won five of seven congressional districts.
Analysis
A Deep Southern state in the Bible Belt, Alabama is one of the most socially conservative states in the nation and is considered to be deeply red, not having voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since it supported Jimmy Carter of neighboring Georgia in 1976. Since then, the state has been competitive at this level in three elections: 1980 (when Carter narrowly lost Alabama while decisively losing re-election nationwide); 1992, and 1996 (when Southerner Bill Clinton lost the state by just under 7 points in both of his victories). In addition, Republicans hold supermajorities in both chambers of the state legislature, and the only Democrat to win a statewide election in Alabama since 2008 is former U.S. Senator Doug Jones, who narrowly won a 2017 special election but was commandingly defeated in 2020.
Donald Trump was able to increase his support and gain ground in every county. He narrowly flipped majority-Black Marengo County into the Republican column for the first time in a presidential race since George W. Bush did so by a similar margin in 2004. Kamala Harris only narrowly held onto Huntsville's urban core by 3.4%, a decline from Biden's 6% margin four years earlier. Though she kept her margin of defeat in the encompassing Madison County within the single digits, it was still a slight drop from Biden's.