To offset gains that Donald J. Trump made in rural and suburban America in 2024, Kamala Harris needed to do better than Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s strong 2020 electoral performance in cities. But she ended up doing worse in urban America — getting 15 percent fewer votes than Mr. Biden in some cities. A New York Times analysis of precinct-level election results — the most detailed available publicly — across 11 cities shows how it happened.
Atlanta
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White precincts
In Atlanta and its suburbs, both candidates found new voters, but Ms. Harris’s gains in precincts where white voters were the largest racial or ethnic group were canceled out by losses elsewhere. Mr. Trump’s uptick in support from voters of color across Atlanta, along with improved performance in the state’s rural areas, was enough for him to win Georgia — a swing state he narrowly lost to Mr. Biden in 2020.
Chicago
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Latino precincts
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Chicago is emblematic of the chief problem the Harris campaign faced in urban areas — a big decline in votes in Democratic strongholds. Even though Ms. Harris won the city by a 58-point margin, she lost ground in nearly every precinct. She picked up just 127,000 votes in Mexican and Puerto Rican neighborhoods, 47,000 fewer than Mr. Biden earned in 2020. Mr. Trump made small gains across the board, but Ms. Harris’s losses were much steeper.
Detroit
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Precincts where Arabs are the largest ethnic group
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In Wayne County, which includes Detroit, Ms. Harris struggled to capture the support of Arab-American voters, many of whom had been turned off by the Biden administration’s Middle East policies. In a swath of voting precincts spanning Dearborn and Hamtramck, which have the nation’s highest concentration of people of Arab ancestry, Mr. Trump picked up thousands of votes compared with 2020, while the Democratic Party lost an even bigger number. Countywide, precincts with high shares of Arab residents made up just 6 percent of the electorate but accounted for more than 40 percent of the decline in Democratic votes.
Houston
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Latino precincts where the median income is less than $50,000
The story in Houston was more about Ms. Harris underperforming Mr. Biden’s 2020 vote totals than about Mr. Trump achieving sharp gains, especially in Latino neighborhoods and lower-income areas. Ms. Harris’s vote total was down 12 percent overall from Mr. Biden’s in 2020, and 28 percent in low-income neighborhoods where Latino voters are the largest group.
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Las Vegas
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Latino precincts
In this rapidly growing area, red shifts were most evident in Latino neighborhoods. While Ms. Harris matched Mr. Biden’s vote total overall, Mr. Trump made significant gains throughout the area.
Miami
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Latino precincts where Cubans are not the largest subgroup
Mr. Trump was already popular with the county’s large Cuban American population, but in this election, his support surged with Latino voters from other groups as well. He received 20 percent more total votes in Latino neighborhoods where Cubans are not the predominant Latino group, like those with large populations of Nicaraguans or Colombians. This helped him flip Miami-Dade County for the first time since 1988, further cementing Florida as a decisively red state.
Milwaukee
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Latino precincts where Mexicans are the largest subgroup
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Mr. Trump saw gains on the city’s South Side, where there are Latino precincts with large Mexican populations, and his increased support coincided with Ms. Harris’s losses there. Ms. Harris picked up votes in some white neighborhoods, but those gains were erased by the losses elsewhere, allowing Mr. Trump to cut into the Democratic margin and flip the state back to the Republican column.
New York City
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Latino precincts
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Latino neighborhoods accounted for nearly half of Mr. Trump’s total gains in his home city compared with 2020. While Ms. Harris won these precincts by a 40-point margin, that fell short of Mr. Biden’s 66-point margin in 2020. In a city with a diverse population of Latinos, Mr. Trump’s vote share grew among all of them — Puerto Rican neighborhoods, Dominican neighborhoods and Mexican neighborhoods alike.
Philadelphia
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White precincts
Ms. Harris outperformed Mr. Biden in some parts of the city — especially in white precincts near the downtown area. White voters were the largest racial or ethnic group in 24 of the 25 precincts where she gained the most votes. But Ms. Harris lost some support in Latino and Black neighborhoods elsewhere in the city, and the Democratic margin fell to 59 points, from 64 points in 2020.
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Phoenix
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Latino precincts
More than half of the Democratic vote decline occurred in Latino neighborhoods, even though these precincts accounted for just 16 percent of the overall vote total. Ms. Harris still won Latino neighborhoods by 23 points, but it was a 12-point drop from the 2020 margin of Mr. Biden, who narrowly won Arizona, a Republican stronghold won only twice by Democrats since 1952.
San Francisco
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Asian precincts
Even this city — known for its liberalism and its importance to Ms. Harris’s career — swung toward Mr. Trump. Ms. Harris’s losses were especially noticeable in the city’s Asian neighborhoods, which are predominantly Chinese but include thousands of voters from other groups. Though Ms. Harris still won the city by a 68-point margin, Mr. Trump gained more than 6,000 votes on top of her vote losses.
Methodology
The 2024 precinct results are from: Georgia’s Secretary of State (Atlanta); Chicago’s Board of Election Commissioners; Wayne County Clerk (Detroit); Harris County Clerk (Houston); Clark County Election Department (Las Vegas); Miami-Dade County’s Supervisor of Elections (Miami); Milwaukee County Clerk; New York City Board of Elections; Philadelphia City Commissioners; Maricopa County Recorder’s Office (Phoenix); San Francisco’s Department of Elections (San Francisco). The 2024 precinct boundary files are from state and local officials.
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For Milwaukee’s 2020 precinct results, The Times used a data set by John Johnson, a research fellow in the Marquette Law School Lubar Center, based on the county clerk and the Wisconsin Legislative Technology Services Bureau. For New York City, estimates for 2020 election results within 2024 precinct boundaries are from an analysis by the Center for Urban Research at CUNY.
For all other areas, the 2020 precinct results are from the Voting and Election Science Team. In these areas, The Times used data from the 2020 decennial census to create a population-weighted estimate of the 2020 vote within 2024 precinct boundaries. These estimates were used to calculate the change in the number of votes and the shift in margin for each candidate in 2024, compared with 2020.
The city of Detroit reports its absentee votes in counting boards, which often span multiple precincts. For the 2024 data, The Times obtained a list of precincts that correspond to each counting board from the Detroit City Clerk, and precinct results were aggregated into Counting Boards. For 2020, the list of precincts that correspond to each counting board was obtained from OpenElections.
Precinct-level estimates for income and education, as well as broad groupings of race and ethnicity, are based on the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2018-22 American Community Survey and information from L2, a nonpartisan voter data vendor. The Times calculated these statistics, which approximate the average demographics of the electorate in a given precinct, by obtaining the demographics of each registered voter’s census block group and aggregating this data to the precinct level.
Precincts are listed as white, Black, Asian or Latino if that group is the most populous. Some precincts are further identified by a subgroup. For example, a precinct is identified as Chinese if a majority of people in the precinct are Asian, and Chinese are the most populous of the Asian subgroups and also represent at least 25 percent of the neighborhood’s population.
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Likewise, Arab precincts in Wayne County were selected if at least 25 percent of residents identified as a member of an Arab ancestry group and Arab ancestry is more common than any other major ancestry group.
The arrow maps showing the shift in margin from 2020 to 2024 exclude precincts where fewer than 100 votes were cast in 2024 across the two candidates.
Changes in the number of ballots cast in a given area could be attributed to many factors, including changes in population. Some cities, like Milwaukee and Philadelphia, have experienced population decline since 2020, while others such as Las Vegas and Phoenix have seen sharp growth. Because it is difficult to estimate with precision the changes in voter population at the precinct level over the years, The Times analysis of turnout examines total votes cast.
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Amazon has been accused of listing products from independent retailers without their consent, even as the ecommerce giant sues start-up Perplexity over its AI software shopping without permission.
The $2.5tn online retailer has listed some independent shops’ full inventory on its platform without seeking permission, four business owners told the Financial Times, enabling customers to shop through Amazon rather than buy directly.
Two independent retailers told the FT that they had also received orders for products that were either out of stock or were mispriced and mislabelled by Amazon leading to customer complaints.
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“Nobody opted into this,” said Angie Chua, owner of Bobo Design Studio, a stationery store based in Los Angeles.
Tech companies are experimenting with artificial intelligence “agents” that can perform tasks like shopping autonomously based on user instructions.
Amazon has blocked agents from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and a host of other AI start-ups from its website.
It filed a lawsuit in November against Perplexity, whose Comet browser was making purchases on Amazon on behalf of users, alleging that the company’s actions risked undermining user privacy and violated its terms of service.
In its complaint, Amazon said Perplexity had taken steps “without prior notice to Amazon and without authorisation” and that it degraded a customer shopping experience it had invested in over several decades.
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Perplexity in a statement at the time said that the lawsuit was a “bully tactic” aimed at scaring “disruptive companies like Perplexity” from improving customers’ experience.
The recent complaints against Amazon relate to its “Buy for Me” function, launched last April, which lets some customers purchase items that are not listed with Amazon but on other retailers’ sites.
Retailers said Amazon did not seek their permission before sending them orders that were placed on the ecommerce site. They do not receive the user’s email address or other information that might be helpful for generating future sales, several sellers told the FT.
“We consciously avoid Amazon because our business is rooted in community and building a relationship with customers,” Chua said. “I don’t know who these customers are.”
Several of the independent retailers said Amazon’s move had led to poor experiences for customers, or hurt their business.
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Sarah Hitchcock Burzio, the owner of Hitchcock Paper Co. in Virginia, said that Amazon had mislabelled items leading to a surge in orders as customers believed they were receiving more expensive versions of a product at a much lower price.
“There were no guardrails set up so when there were issues there was nobody I could go to,” she said.
Product returns and complaints for the “Buy for Me” function are handled by sellers rather than Amazon, even when errors are produced by the Seattle-based group.
Amazon enables sellers to opt out of the service by contacting the company on a specific email address.
Amazon said: “Shop Direct and Buy for Me are programmes we’re testing that help customers discover brands and products not currently sold in Amazon’s store, while helping businesses reach new customers and drive incremental sales.
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“We have received positive feedback on these programmes. Businesses can opt out at any time.”
President Donald Trump said Tuesday night that Venezuela will turn over 30 million to 50 million barrels of oil to the United States, to be sold at market value and with the proceeds controlled by the US.
Interim authorities in Venezuela will turn over “sanctioned oil” Trump said on Truth Social.
The US will use the proceeds “to benefit the people of Venezuela and the United States!” he wrote.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright has been directed to “execute this plan, immediately,” and the barrels “will be taken by storage ships, and brought directly to unloading docks in the United States.”
CNN has reached out to the White House for more information.
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A senior administration official, speaking under condition of anonymity, told CNN that the oil has already been produced and put in barrels. The majority of it is currently on boats and will now go to US facilities in the Gulf to be refined.
Although 30 to 50 million barrels of oil sounds like a lot, the United States consumed just over 20 million barrels of oil per day over the past month.
That amount may lower oil prices a bit, but it probably won’t lower Americans’ gas prices that much: Former President Joe Biden released about four to six times as much — 180 million barrels of oil — from the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve in 2022, which lowered gas prices by only between 13 cents and 31 cents a gallon over the course of four months, according to a Treasury Department analysis.
US oil fell about $1 a barrel, or just under 2%, to $56, immediately after Trump made his announcement on Truth Social.
Selling up to 50 million barrels could raise quite a bit of revenue: Venezuelan oil is currently trading at $55 per barrel, so if the United States can find buyers willing to pay market price, it could raise between $1.65 billion and $2.75 billion from the sale.
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Venezuela has built up significant stockpiles of crude over since the United States began its oil embargo late last year. But handing over that much oil to the United States may deplete Venezuela’s own oil reserves.
The oil is almost certainly coming from both its onshore storage and some of the seized tankers that were transporting oil: The country has about 48 million barrels of storage capacity and was nearly full, according to Phil Flynn, senior market analyst at the Price Futures Group. The tankers were transporting about 15 million to 22 million barrels of oil, according to industry estimates.
It’s unclear over what time period Venezuela will hand over the oil to the United States.
The senior administration official said the transfer would happen quickly because Venezuela’s crude is very heavy, which means it can’t be stored for long.
But crude does not go bad if it is not refined in a certain amount of time, said Andrew Lipow, the president of Lipow Oil Associates, in a note. “It has sat underground for hundreds of millions of years. In fact, much of the oil in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve has been around for decades,” he wrote.
new video loaded: Nvidia Shows Off New A.I. Chip at CES
transcript
transcript
Nvidia Shows Off New A.I. Chip at CES
At the annual tech conference, CES, Nvidia showed off a new A.I. chip, known as Vera Rubin, which is more efficient and powerful than previous generations of chips.
This is the Vera CPU. This is one CPU. This is groundbreaking work. I would not be surprised if the industry would like us to make this format and this structure an industry standard in the future. Today, we’re announcing Alpamayo, the world’s first thinking, reasoning autonomous vehicle A.I.
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At the annual tech conference, CES, Nvidia showed off a new A.I. chip, known as Vera Rubin, which is more efficient and powerful than previous generations of chips.
