The full 2020 election results at the county level are available, and I’ll be looking at a few key states. Let’s start of Pennslyvania, because why not? Here are PA’s counties, shaded red or blue depending on how strongly they supported the R or D candidate. Light shades means the vote was close to 50/50; white means it was 50/50.
The lower right corner is Philadelphia (very strongly Biden) and its suburbs. The one patch of blue in the western part of the state is Pittsburgh. The problem with this map is that it doesn’t account for population. Some of those deep-red counties don’t have many people in them. One way to account for this is to base the map on raw vote totals, not percentages. This map shows the winner of each county in terms of raw number of votes, again shaded red or blue depending on the margin.
Biden won Philadelphia county (lower right) by 470,000 votes, so it’s dark blue. A few other Biden counties are lighter shades of blue. Almost all of the Trump counties are just slightly pink; he may have won them by huge percentages, but their raw vote total wasn’t very big, and this map shows this. (As an example, Trump won Fulton County 85%-14%, so it shows up deep red in the first map. But the county only has 8,000 voters, so the raw vote victory was 5,800, and thus it displays as the slightest pink).
So, looks like Philadelphia county won it for Biden? Well, yes and no. Let’s look at what changed from 2016 to 2020. Here is a map that compares how a county voted in 2016 to how it did in 2020, adjusted for the national lean. Remember, the color reflects the trend compared to the previous election; blue doesn’t necessarily mean they voted for Biden, just that they vote more for Biden than last time.
Take a look at the lower right corner. That’s right, Philadelphia leaned much more toward Trump than expected. Don’t get me wrong; it still voted overwhelmingly for Biden (81%-18%). But that’s less than the margin that Clinton won by four years earlier (82-15). Since Biden won the national vote by 2.5% more than Clinton, you would expect his margin to grow in that county, but instead it shrunk. Go figure.
What actually won the state for Biden was the rest of the eastern counties, including the suburbs of Philadelphia.
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