For those interested in data and electoral politics, the above map is a bright, shiny object capable of holding the attention for hours. It shows, at the county level, the result of the 2016 presidential election, but rather than reddish hues meaning Trump won and bluish ones meaning Clinton did, the colors are linked to which candidate did better compared to the previous (2012) presidential election result. That is why, for example, Utah is almost entirely blue: Trump won Utah, but in 2012 the Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, outperformed him in all but one of the state's counties.
The map tends to confirm the conventional wisdom about how Trump was able to win. Maybe I've been helping with too much seventh grade math, but it seems easy to make out a "Trump parabola" extending northwesterly to the Dakotas and northeasterly to Maine from an inflection point in western Tennessee. That curve encloses a huge area, almost all of it red—and a significant portion dark red, indicating Trump did far better than Romney had. The so called "blue wall" states flipped by Trump—Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin—are, except for a sliver of the most easterly portion of Pennsylvania, embraced entirely within the parabola.
Polling suggests Biden is on the cusp of making the updated version of this map look very different. We tend to focus on the polls of "battleground states," but maybe one of Trump's worst recent results came from South Dakota, where the Argus Leader/KELO TV poll found him leading Biden by 51 to 40 percent. That's a safe lead, but in 2016 Trump carried South Dakota by 62 to 32 percent. Even if the final result is somewhat more favorable to Trump, much of South Dakota will likely be shades of blue, like Utah above, in the updated map. The state's most populous county, Minnehaha, which is home to Sioux Falls, might well be pretty dark blue: Trump carried it last time by 14 points, but, in the Argus/KELO poll, Biden is actually ahead, though narrowly, in the Sioux Falls metro.
The above map is a dismal sight for Democrats, but at least across the Sun Belt, North Carolina to southern California by way of Texas, there isn't much dark red. Moreover, if you have a sharp geographical eye, the prevailing light pink of the Sun Belt is interrupted by splotches of blue at the locations of big cities. Arizona doesn't have a lot of counties, but several are blue, including Maricopa, which is the one shaped like an L rotated 90 degrees clockwise. It's home to the Phoenix metro, where well over half of the votes in a statewide election are cast. Romney won Maricopa County by 12 points and the state by 10; Trump won Maricopa by 3 points and the state by 3.5; Biden is currently leading in polls of Arizona, mainly because he's ahead in Maricopa. Look at Georgia: almost entirely pink and red except for a substantial cluster of blue around Atlanta. I'm surprised by the blue in the Texas panhandle, but go southeast from there through some red and you get to a group of five contiguous counties, two light blue, three pretty dark blue—that's the Dallas-Fort Worth metro, a comparative treasure trove of voters. The blue blob of counties on the Gulf of Mexico is Houston and Galveston. From there, go west across the pink till you hit the middle of a kind of walkway of blue counties, northeast to southwest: you're on the interstate connecting Austin to San Antonio.
That the Sun Belt looks so different from the Trump parabola suggests two basic strategies for the 2020 Democratic nominee. One would be to recapture Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin by turning the interior of the parabola blue. The second would be to accelerate the existing trend in the Sun Belt by exciting the region's younger and browner voters, and by juicing turnout in the growing metros. There's no rule against both, but different candidates were better suited for one task or the other, and the Dems chose the guy best fit to win in the parabola. Biden's campaign has focused on that task, to the point of frustrating the likes of Beto O'Rourke and Julian Castro, who think the Democrats might be leaving 54 electoral votes on the table in Georgia and Texas, not to mention three Senate seats on the ballot in those two states. On the other side of the argument, Biden's northern tier strategy has put even Ohio and Iowa in play.
Now we're a week from the last day of voting, when everyone tries to gauge where the two campaigns think they are based on where they go in the last days. The Biden campaign announced over the weekend that this week he'll be traveling to Georgia, and that Kamala Harris will be in Texas for the last day of early voting. The public polls indicate that the likely explanation for their travel itinerary is that they're safely ahead in Pennsylvania-Michigan-Wisconsin and that Georgia and Texas are within reach. Three other big Sun Belt states seem to be occupying a space between these two groupings: in North Carolina, Florida, and Arizona, Biden leads, narrowly but consistently.
The one thing that's virtually certain is that more Americans will vote for Biden. That assures us of exactly nothing, of course. In another week, after the Senate has confirmed Barrett and Biden has won the national vote by several million, Republican presidents will have made five of the last seven appointments to the Supreme Court even though the Democratic candidate for president won more votes in five of the six presidential elections conducted over the same period.
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