I'm reading David Copperfield like its first readers did, in installments, only in my case the delay is caused not by a publishing schedule but by an intervening event—the election, the wherefores and whys of the result consuming my attention as if it were a season's worth of Twins games. This morning I came across the above map in The New York Times. As the legend indicates, it shows, at the precinct level, the shift in Georgia's presidential vote from 2016 to 2020. The most immediately striking aspect of the map is the wide blue ring around the south-central part of the Atlanta metro, where the city's African-American population is concentrated. Biden made no gains in the "doughnut hole"—these precincts are so overwhelmingly Democratic that there was hardly any upside for him. He could have hoped to boost turnout in this area, and in fact he did, but not by as much as the state's overall turnout was up. The result was that African-Americans made a smaller part of the Georgia electorate, and, if anything, Trump won a bigger share of their votes: the doughnut hole is mostly whitish pink, not light blue.
But Trump suffered a meltdown in Atlanta's sprawling, populous suburbs. I don't think race plays much of a part in the formation of the doughnut. Some Trumpists have hinted darkly at "voting irregularities" in places like Philadelphia, Detroit, and Atlanta, but Biden did no better in these urban centers than Hillary Clinton had four years ago. He might have done a little worse. In Georgia, the suburban ring around Atlanta was the difference maker. For example, in Gwinnett County, in the northeastern part of the blue ring, Biden won by 58-40 compared to Clinton's 50-44. The biggest county in the northwest of the doughnut is Cobb, which went for Clinton by 50-46: Biden carried it by 56-42. The statewide impact of these large swings in suburban counties was augmented by growing populations and high turnouts. In Gwinnett County, the Democratic nominee's raw vote margin went from 19,000 to 75,000; in Cobb County, from 9000 to 56,000.
It's not black and brown voters who are mainly responsible for supplying these margins. You can get an idea who they are by zooming out from Georgia. Sean Trende, an elections analyst at RealClearPolitics, posted to Twitter today a list of the 50 states ranked by the percentage of eligible voters who are white with a college degree. "Can you spot the pattern?" Trende asked. Well, in the top quintile, #1 Maryland through #10 New Mexico, Biden went 10-for-10. In the next quintile, Illinois through Arizona, he went 8-for-10, the exceptions being Texas (12) and Utah (19). Biden only won 25 states, so he was 7-for-30 in the bottom three quintiles. That's a lot of correlation!
It's sort of comical to contemplate Republicans reflexively blaming a presidential election loss on the cheating inner-city blacks & browns. They think they have an Atlanta-Philadelphia-Detroit-Minneapolis problem, and they're not all wrong about that, but what's really dimmed their prospects now is a Marietta-Upper Darby Township-Bloomfield Hills-Minnetonka problem.
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