Donald Trump has been a boon for the bottom lines of national news outlets. Since his inauguration, The New York Times grossed $1 billion in subscription revenue and CNN's ratings have soared. But his entire presidency may be thanks to the gutted state of local news across the U.S., according to a new, lengthy report from Politico.

According to their findings, Trump flourished in what's being called "news deserts," or areas with a below average number of people subscribing to news. Trump not only beat Hillary Clinton in these areas—he even outperformed Mitt Romney's 2012 election results. From the report:

POLITICO’s findings—which put Trump’s escalating attacks on the media in a new context—were drawn from a comparison of election results and subscription information from the Alliance for Audited Media, an industry group that verifies print and digital circulation for advertisers. The findings cover more than 1,000 mainstream news publications in more than 2,900 counties out of 3,100 nationwide from every state except Alaska, which does not hold elections at the county level.

The results show a clear correlation between low subscription rates and Trump’s success in the 2016 election, both against Hillary Clinton and when compared to Romney in 2012. Those links were statistically significant even when accounting for other factors that likely influenced voter choices, such as college education and employment, suggesting that the decline of local media sources by itself may have played a role in the election results.

Meanwhile, Trump struggled against Clinton (and didn't outperform Romney) in areas with higher than average news subscribers. And this trend is surprisingly consistent, according to Politico: "For every 10 percent of households in a county that subscribed to a news outlet, Trump’s vote share dropped by an average of 0.5 percentage points." And while the results still fit with the urban-rural divide that's often been cited in Trump's victory, Politico found that he still "appeared to struggle even in rural areas with a higher-than-average presence of mainstream media."

More and more people are reporting that they get their news directly from social media, where Trump himself can post whatever he wants without being mediated by a fact-checker, like he did when he repeatedly attacked the caravan of migrants fleeing Central America. Billionaires are buying and dismembering local papers across the country, and now Sinclair Broadcast Group, thanks to Trump's FCC stooge Ajit Pai, is poised to control local news stations for 72 percent of the country.

That last point paints an especially grim picture: Local TV news has been losing ratings, but it still attracts more viewers on average than cable or network news. So while viewership is down, it still represents a sizable chunk of news consumption. And Sinclair is hell-bent on turning the stations already under its control—some communities' last sources of local news—into safe spaces for Trump.