In 2016, about 72% of voters in Los Angeles County chose former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a Democrat, for president, while 23% voted for Republican Donald Trump.

In 2020, about 71% of the county’s voters voted for Democrat Joe Biden, while 27% voted for Trump for president.

Of the ballots that have been counted so far in this year’s general election, about 65 percent of LA County voters supported Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris. Another 32% voted for Trump.

The LA County Registrar’s Office estimated it had counted more than 3.4 million ballots as of Sunday, Nov. 10, and had about 325,300 ballots remaining. Even if Harris received all of the remaining votes, at best he would get to about 68%.

In short, fewer people in LA County voted for the Democratic candidate this year and more went with the Republican candidate for president.

In addition, in this year’s race for Los Angeles District Attorneyvoters soundly rejected incumbent George Gascón, a Democrat with a far-left progressive agenda, in favor of Nathan Hochman, who previously ran as a Republican for state attorney general two years ago but ran as independently this year.

So does Los Angeles County – where Democrats make up 52% ​​of registered voters, and Republicans make up 18% – become more conservative?

Before anyone reached for that red pencil, a political pundit delivered a message: Yes, voters here voted a little more conservative this year. But make no mistake, Los Angeles is still a heavily Democratic county — and that’s not going to change anytime soon.

“LA County is a blue county. This is not going away. How blue will it be – dark blue or medium blue or light blue? It’s a little less dark blue than it was a week ago,” said Democrat Zev Yaroslavsky, a former LA City Council member and former LA County Supervisor who is now director of the Los Angeles Initiative at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs.

Republican Joel Fox, who worked on L.A. Mayor Richard Riordan’s gubernatorial campaign and now teaches at Pepperdine University’s School of Public Policy, agreed that L.A. remains a liberal county, as urban centers tend to be.

But he said there were signs from this year’s general election that he was “not liberal across the board”.

Fox noted that the vast majority of LA County voters supported it Proposition 36which allows for harsher penalties for certain crimes. And LA County voters rejected it Proposition 33 to expand rent control.

“I don’t deny that LA County is a strong liberal bastion,” Fox said. “However, there are (signs) that on certain issues there is a tendency to go more to the conservative position.”

Roxanne Hoge, communications director for the Los Angeles County Republican Party, said it’s telling that a larger number of voters in the county supported more conservative candidates this time around — and despite the fact that many people who moved from California in recent years aligned with the Republicans.

“The people who left were the most common-sense, Republican-leaning people we’ve had. So to outperform with the California exodus, yeah, that means something,” Hoge said of this year’s election results.

“And what it means is something quite simple: people don’t like to be robbed. … Getting robbed is not a partisan issue,” she said of contests like the prosecutor’s race, where public safety was the order of the day.

Regardless of how the numbers shake out for individual candidates or ballot measures, Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors Chairwoman Lindsey Horvath, a Democrat, said that in Los Angeles many of the values ​​Democrats have fought for will be supported here.

Last week, a day after Trump won a second term as president, Horvath issued a statement saying LA County “will not abandon our values.”

“Los Angeles County will continue to protect our immigrant communities and affirm reproductive health, LGBTQ+ rights, and every person’s right to live and be met with care first by their government,” Horvath said. “Los Angeles County will remain the social safety net for our local communities while striving to model for the nation what inclusion, harmony and a more perfect union can look like.”

Yaroslavsky believes voter turnout in LA County this year was lower than in the last presidential election, which he said could explain Harris’ poor results compared to Democratic candidates in the last two presidential elections.

“It’s unclear whether people who didn’t turn out to vote would have been more likely to vote for the Harris ticket,” Yaroslavsky said.

“The people who vote in every election, most of them are LA County Democrats, but it’s a little bit more of a conservative turnout,” he said. “People who only vote in presidential elections tend to be working people, blue-collar people on the lower end of the economic spectrum, renters. If voter turnout is down in this election, then it stands to reason that a significant portion of that decline is in that demographic decline, which may account for the potential decline” in support of Harris.

He notes that while Rep. Adam Schiff has won his bid for the US Senatethe congressman also appeared on track to receive a smaller percentage of the vote in LA County than Biden did four years ago. As of Sunday, Schiff had about 65 percent of the vote.

As for the overwhelming rejection of current prosecutor Gascón in this election, Yaroslavsky characterized it as voters wanting a “course correction” for someone with extremely liberal views.

“I don’t think LA County is moving into a far right wing. But he says they didn’t like the direction LA County’s chief prosecutor was taking. They wanted a better common sense approach,” he said.

That said, voters in neighboring counties have raised the possibility of a shift in Southern California’s electorate.

As of the most recent vote counts, Trump led Harris in both San Bernardino and Riverside counties. There are still ballots to be counted, but if the numbers are valid Trump could be the first Republican presidential candidate since George W. Bush in 2004 to carry the Inland Empire.

Hoge, the spokesman for the LA County Republican Party, believes the results of this year’s general election could encourage more middle-of-the-roaders, who in the past might have been afraid to voice their opinions in heavily liberal jurisdictions, to speak out in future.

“I think what it does for local elections going forward is more people will come forward to run for office,” she said. “Some of that fear has been removed. Now, if there’s a little more ability to breathe easy and say, ‘that policy isn’t really working,’ I think that’s a big step in the right direction.”

But will LA County ever change enough to truly be considered red territory?

“California was considered a Republican state well into the 20th century,” Fox said. “So yes, things can change. Policies change. Circumstances change. Never say “never”.

“But,” he added, “it won’t be next week.”

Writer Jeff Horseman contributed to this report.