Color a map of the 2020 election by county and most of it turns red. Joe Biden still won by more than 7 million votes. That gap between land and people is what these maps are built to show. They are my own work, and they continue the 2016 series that included the original Trumpland and Clinton Archipelago maps.
Joe Biden won the 2020 election with 306 electoral votes to Donald Trump’s 232 and 51.3 percent of the popular vote, in the highest-turnout presidential race since 1900. The maps below show Trump carrying most of the land, while the counties Biden won produce roughly 70 percent of U.S. economic output.
Key takeaways
Biden won 81,283,501 votes to Trump’s 74,223,975.
Turnout reached about 66.6 percent of eligible voters.
Trump was the 11th incumbent president to lose a second term, and the first since George H.W. Bush in 1992.
Counties Biden won account for roughly 70 percent of U.S. GDP, and Trump’s counties for about 29 percent.
Biden gained more than 15 million votes on Clinton’s 2016 total, and Trump gained more than 11 million on his own.
How did the 2020 election turn out?
Biden’s 81,283,501 votes were the most ever cast for a presidential candidate. His 51.3 percent share was the largest won by any challenger since 1932. Trump added more than 11 million votes to his 2016 count, and Biden beat Clinton’s 2016 total by more than 15 million.
2016
2020
Democratic votes
65,853,514 (Clinton)
81,283,501 (Biden)
Republican votes
62,984,828 (Trump)
74,223,975 (Trump)
Electoral votes
Trump 304, Clinton 227
Biden 306, Trump 232
What does the county map of 2020 look like?
Red counties backed Trump and blue counties backed Biden. The pattern looks a lot like 2016. Biden won the people, and Trump won most of the land.
Why do Biden’s counties produce about 70 percent of GDP?
Brookings found that counties won by Biden account for roughly 70 percent of U.S. economic output, against about 29 percent for Trump’s. Biden’s counties tend to be more diverse, more educated and more white-collar (Forbes). He also flipped six of the 100 highest-output counties.
What if only one county per state counted?
Two what-if maps test the urban and rural split. In the first, the most densely populated county in each state decides how the state votes. In the second, the least dense county does.
The candidate preference map colors counties by winner. The blended hue map mixes red and blue by vote margin, so a 52 percent county looks different from a 90 percent one. The last map adds vote totals to the margin, so counties with many votes stand out from nearly empty ones.
In TrumpLand, height follows Trump’s vote share, and anywhere he fell under 50 percent becomes water. The Biden Archipelago flips the logic, so Democratic strongholds rise as islands.
The islands cluster around big metro areas, and the sea around them is mostly small-town and rural counties. Brookings found the same split in its economic data.
Flip through the sliders and find your own county. Share what changed near you in the comments. The 2024 version is here.
Jackie – Are you out there?
Great