Keep in mind that "wealthiest counties" often means highest median HH income, which often means homogeneous prosperous outer suburbs or exurbs almost completely made up of SFHs with 2 earners, often with a nouveau riche bent. Includes a lot of middle management types and so on. It's generally not where the real "elites" live. They tend to live in more "inner" areas where you'll find more apartments, seniors and so on.
For instance, Loudoun County may have a higher median HH income than Montgomery or Fairfax counties, but you'll find more wealth in Montgomery and Fairfax (and NW DC). These are where you'll find the elite professionals, Ivy League grads and so on.
Similarly, Suffolk, Putnam and Monmouth come out "ahead" of Westchester and Fairfield, but they're obviously less "elite."
This. The county level can be deceiving as the "wealthiest" counties tend to be uniformly 2 earner couples at 2-4X the median household income. While they're clearly better off than average, they don't run the show. They tend to just be higher paid employees, not business owners or professional investors. It would be a big mistake to think of them as the country's cultural elite, which is a mistake half this site seems to make.
I think the likeliest candidate for an elite area that swung hard to Trump would be something like a giant ranch that brings in $5-10M in an average year, is physically big enough to have it's own precinct, and a majority of the voters are in the landowning family.
