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Donald Trump made significant gains in working class neighborhoods in Hawaii, where voters who have been hardest hit by inflation and rising costs boosted the president-elect to a 20-year high among Republican nominees for president.

It mirrors what’s happening across the country, where Trump leads the popular vote by more than 3 million. In Hawaii, Trump made the greatest gains in the last eight years in neighborhoods like Waipahu and Kalihi, a Civil Beat analysis of voter turnout data shows.

“He was really talking about things that the average working person and family person is thinking about when you’re talking about the effects of inflation, the economy, crime and a lot of the big issues affecting the average person,” Joel Borgquist, a Republican political strategist, said.

Those were areas that Kamala Harris failed to hit on hard enough during her truncated campaign, Borgquist said.

“The person trying to make ends meet doesn’t care who Beyonce has endorsed,” he said.

Hawaii is often thought of as a deep-blue state, but data shows that most of the areas outside of urban centers are very much purple.

While Harris dominated the Hawaii vote, data shows Trump has gained ground. In 2016, 29% of Hawaii voters cast ballots for Trump. That increased to 34% in 2020 and 37% this year.

It’s the best showing by a Republican nominee in the Aloha State since 2004, when George W. Bush got 45% of the vote.

Support for Trump has seen a big boost across the state. Precinct-level votes for the Republican nominee for president since 2012 have rarely outnumbered those for the Democrats. This year, votes for Trump outnumbered those for Harris in nearly two dozen of Hawaii’s 250 voting precincts.

Niihau voted almost entirely for Trump this year. Harris got just one vote there compared to Trump, who had 22.

Some of the biggest jumps in turnout for Trump came in Kalihi and Waipahu.

They have somewhat similar demographic profiles: both communities have a high percentage of multigenerational households, similar annual household income and both have a preponderance of people working in the service industry and other managerial jobs, according to U.S. Census data.

In House District 30, which runs from the Kapalama Canal in the east to Middle Street in the West, Trump got 47.4% of the votes, more than a 20 percentage point increase from 2016.

Trump made similar gains across House District 36, which covers much of the area bordered by the freeway and Farrington Highway in Waipahu. Trump won 47.2% of the vote this year, up from 28% eight years ago.

On average, 7.7% of Hawaii households are considered multigenerational, which the census bureau defines as having three or more generations in one household. In Kalihi, that number is more than twice the state average at 19%.

Parts of Waipahu are even higher, at upward of 20%.

The average annual household income across Kalihi varies widely, between $51,000 to $143,000. It’s slightly higher in Waipahu, where annual income ranges from $76,000 to $176,000.

Wendy Balidoy used to live in Kalihi and now owns several businesses in nearby Liliha. She serves as the Hawaii Republican Party's chair for districts in West Honolulu, which includes Kalihi. 

She described Kalihi residents as the “working hands of America.”

“That’s the person having a very hard time, working paycheck to paycheck,” she said.

On top of the economic worries that began during the pandemic, she said residents are also dealing with an increased number of homeless people in the area and concerns over crime. She owns a cafe in Liliha, and recalls workers having to clean human feces out of a parking lot or dealing with broken shop windows.

It’s a perennial issue in Hawaii that Balidoy feels Democrats who have been in power have not done enough to address, especially when it comes to beefing up mental health resources available to people experiencing homelessness.

Backlash against local Democrats has grown in the last four years with the GOP increasing its numbers in both the House and the Senate. Republican candidates this election did well in parts of the state like Ewa Beach and Waianae that already skewed Republican or had a history of electing conservative candidates.

However, districts that saw big increases in turnout for Trump still elected Democrats back to the Legislature.

Voters in Kalihi’s House District 30 overwhelmingly elected Democrat Shirley Templo to the state House. Templo had 64.8% of the vote to GOP candidate P.M. Azinga's 28.9%.

Nationally, Democrats seen as more moderate have been successful even in red districts. During the primary, Templo won an upset victory over Sonny Ganaden, one of the few progressives in the House.

The district that represents the core neighborhoods of Waipahu has never elected a Republican representative to the House. This year, the GOP did not field a challenger to incumbent Rep. Rachele Lamosao.

And Democrats are doing better in more affluent and older neighborhoods, some of them previously thought of as Republican strongholds.

Harris had close to 70% of the vote across House District 18, which has returned Republican Rep. Gene Ward to the House for 18 years in a row. Trump actually lost 3 percentage points across the district.

Similarly, support for Trump in precincts that make up most of Kailua dropped from 35% in 2016 to 31% this year. The area used to be represented by former Republican Rep. Cynthia Thielen, who endorsed Democrat Natalia Hussey-Burdick before leaving office in 2022.