How the Pacific Voted in the US Election

The U.S. elections on November 5 have redrawn much of the political map, as a red wave propelled Donald Trump to his second presidential term. Trump’s emphatic win will be digested and dissected for years to come, with stinging lessons for the vanquished Democratic Party and laudatory ones for the Republican Party. Contrary to polls predicting razor thin margins between victory for Vice President Kamala Harris or Trump, the results were anything but close because Trump amassed an unlikely coalition of supporters that amounted to a crushing defeat for the incumbent party.

Voters also went to the polls on U.S. Pacific islands: the state of Hawai'i and the three U.S. territories of Guam, American Samoa, and the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas (CNMI). The Pacific results offer insight into the political trends in these jurisdictions, the localized issues on voters’ minds as well as the curious forms of American democracy that operate there. Votes from the Pacific may not have reflected the drastic shifts to the right of most of the mainland (though the District of Columbia bucked the nationwide trend with 92.5 percent voting for Harris, giving her three of the 226 electoral college votes she won).

The state of Hawai'i continued its solid support for the Democratic Party nominee, having only voted for a Republican candidate twice since statehood in 1959. Harris won 60.6 percent of votes, down 3.7 points from what President Joe Biden won in 2020, which meant a slight gain for Trump (from 34.3 percent in 2020 to 37.5 percent in 2024). Incumbent Democrat Senator Mazie Hirono was comfortably returned to office with 62.5 percent of votes, fending off three challengers, including the curiously named Shelby Pikachu Billionaire representing the “We the People” party (he won 1.8 percent of votes).

The state’s two congressional districts returned the Democrat incumbents, Representatives Ed Case and Jill Tokuda, with 65.3 percent and 61.4 percent of votes, respectively. Democratic candidates also succeeded in state and district races, providing one of the few places in the U.S. where the Democratic Party had a good night (the outcome of the presidential race notwithstanding). Hawai'i’s constitutional amendment permitting same-sex marriage succeeded, with 51.3 percent supporting, 40.4 percent against, and with 7.8 percent of ballots returned blank and overvotes (0.4 percent) also counted as no votes as per state law.

American democracy, and hence voting, gets more complicated in territories where variations on citizenship, congressional representation, and lack of electoral college votes mean that votes for the presidency, if they occur at all, are in the form of a “straw poll.”

This election raised ongoing grievances about voter rights in U.S. territories. Not only do U.S. citizens in the territories not get a say in electing the president, many U.S. citizens residing in the territories are denied the right to vote at all. This is especially felt in Guam, where people who have served in the military, amounting to about one in eight of the island’s 175,000 population, are disproportionately impacted by voting rules. The barriers to U.S. citizens casting ballots were potentially raised in 2024 thanks to the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act (SAVE Act), which passed the Republican-led House in July but has not yet been passed by the Senate. At the time, Delegate Gregorio Kilili Sablan of the CNMI highlighted how this act would impact citizenship rights of those born in U.S. territories.

In Guam’s straw presidential poll, Harris won with 49.46 percent, while Trump garnered 46.22 percent support. In 2020, Biden won this poll with 55 percent, a metric that reflects Guam’s political shift. Guam reelected Republican James C. Moylan as its delegate to Congress, with 52.69 percent of the vote. Moylan won this seat, long held by Democrats, in the 2022 midterm elections. Moylan, like other delegates to Congress from the five territories and the District of Columbia, has the same powers as the other 435 representatives “except that they may not vote when the House is meeting as the House of Representatives.” Despite this restriction, delegates remain critical voices in Washington from the three Pacific territories. In the 15-seat Guam legislature, the proportion of Republicans to Democrats flipped. Now nine Republicans hold seats to the six held by Democrats. Down-ticket local races reflected a mix of Democrat and Republican wins, though the overall assessment is that Guam moved to the right.

Guam’s move to the right has had some interesting checks, particularly on the polarizing issue of abortion rights. In 2024, Guam’s Republican Attorney General, Douglas Moylan (who is distantly related to Delegate James Moylan), attempted to revive a total abortion ban in the territory. The Guam Supreme Court disallowed the move, so Moylan requested the matter be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court. In October 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected Moylan’s request to overturn the Guam Supreme Court’s decision, an interesting development given their earlier decision to repeal Roe v. Wade.

In the CNMI, Kimberlyn King-Hinds of the CNMI Republican Party won the race to be the territory’s delegate to Congress. She succeeds a Democrat, Gregorio Sablan, who served in that position for 16 years and announced he would not seek reelection in early 2024. In the other 60 races in the CNMI general election, Democrats, Republicans, and Independents shared victories. CNMI voters do not vote for U.S. president.

The last part of the U.S. to vote in the election is American Samoa, which lies just to the east of the international date line. Voters there, who are U.S. nationals but not citizens, comfortably reelected delegate Aumua Amata Coleman Radewagen, with 74.8 percent of the nearly 10,000 votes cast. The popular Republican who has held that office since 2015 has been a leading figure in bipartisan initiatives to boost U.S. relations with the Pacific region.

In the gubernatorial race, no candidate received the requisite 50 percent of votes needed to win in the first round of voting on November 5. American Samoan voters thus returned to the polls on November 19 for a runoff election that saw Republican-affiliated candidate Pulaali'i Nikolao Pula garner nearly 60 percent of the vote to unseat incumbent Governor Lemanu Peleti Mauga

Although these Pacific elections are on the edges of U.S. democracy, there is little doubt that the Pacific islands, Hawai'i, the three U.S. territories, and rest of the region, will continue to be a significant focal point for the next Trump administration, as they were for the Biden administration since 2022. Continuing geostrategic competition with China will all but guarantee that.