In 2012, Marion County, Indiana voted to re-elect President Obama by a margin of 23 percentage points. By 2024, the county moved 5 more points towards the Democrats, giving Kamala Harris a 28-point margin over Donald Trump. But this shift wasn’t uniform, and the movement of different neighborhoods in the city exemplifies political trends that occurred in many other American cities.
As has been the case nationally, educational polarization explains much of the recent political realignment in Indianapolis. The least educated parts of the city shifted 7 points towards Republicans as politics moved from the Obama era to the Trump era. But the most educated neighborhoods swung even harder toward Democrats, by an average of 25 points.
Adding a racial component helps to further identify the nature of the changes. The largest swings in both directions occurred in the city’s white-majority precincts. Shifts in racially mixed precincts were less pronounced, while most Black-majority precincts shifted towards Republicans.
Visualizing every precinct’s margin in both 2012 and 2024 reveals the same education-based divergence. But it also shows that a good amount of Republicans gains have come in precincts where Obama was dominant in 2012, while Democrats have gained ground among the college-educated precincts that were politically divided.
Beyond confirming the nature of trends in educational polarization, the detailed election data also offers an opportunity to describe Indianapolis geographically, based on recent voting patterns. Building contiguous clusters based on voting data yields 14 regions of the city that tend to look similar demographically and politically.
Indy’s largest political shift occurred in the wealthy, highly educated, Carmel-adjacent Northside region. Evenly split between Obama and Romney in 2012, the region voted for Harris over Trump by a 39-point margin in 2024. Turnout was 77% of the area’s voting-age population in 2024. The other regions on the northern edge of the city also moved significantly toward Democrats.
The largest shift towards Republicans occurred in the Haughville & Eagledale region, where Obama’s dominant 62-point margin weakened to a 46-point margin for Harris. Many of this region’s residents claim Mexican ancestry. Only 12% of adults have a college degree and 2024 turnout represented just 33% of the voting-age population.