Larry Sabato’s outfit points to a techical advantage Democratic voters give to Biden….
On the county level?
MORE Democrats vote More….
Trump took smaller counties with less people….
We also KNOW from other sources that Trump’s voters are and will be less educated…..
In other words?
Trump’s vote’s do seem to be from the BOTTOM of the barrel…..
— Just about 150 of the nation’s more than 3,100 counties cast half of the nation’s presidential vote in 2020.
— As we typically see at the state level, the more vote-rich counties are more Democratic, while the thousands of smaller counties that make up the bottom half are more Republican.
— This political gulf has widened. Despite similar overall national presidential margins in 2012 and 2020, the difference between the top and bottom halves expanded about 10 points from 2012 to 2020.
— Joe Biden won 126 of the 151 top half counties, while Donald Trump won 2,548 of the remaining 2,960 counties in the bottom half.
— Trump’s wins among the top half counties were concentrated among the smaller pieces of that group — Biden won all but one of the nearly 50 counties that cast 500,000 votes or more.
Top half vs. bottom half at the national level
Earlier this year, we analyzed several key states by dividing them in half, with a state’s most vote-rich counties adding up to half the statewide vote making up the “top half” of a state, and the rest of the state’s counties making up the “bottom half.” The general though not universal trend is that the top halves are getting bluer and the bottom halves are getting redder or, at the very least, the gap between the two halves is widening.
Both of those observations apply when splitting the nation as a whole into two halves. The nation’s most vote-rich counties, collectively, got bluer from 2012 to 2020 — the two elections we have been comparing as part of this series — while the remaining bottom half counties got collectively redder. That means that the gap between the two halves is increasing….