Biden Wins the Electoral College With 306 Votes

With the Associated Press and most media calling the state of Georgia for President-Elect Joe Biden and the state of North Carolina called for President Trump, the President-Elect officially wins the Electoral College with 306 electoral votes over the President’s 232 votes. Ironically, Hillary Clinton lost with 232 votes back in 2016, so in terms of the number of votes, there has been a complete flip.

Our final electoral map is as follows. (Note: Because a number of states still haven’t fully counted all of their votes yet, I will not use margin colors for this map.)

The final results indicate that President-Elect Biden flips the states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. In addition, he also flips Nebraska’s Second Congressional District. Donald Trump retains the battleground states of Florida, Iowa, North Carolina, Ohio, and Texas.

This was a really interesting year as it seems like both a blue wave and a red wave collided with each other to hand Joe Biden a very strange victory. Surprisingly, the only state in the entire Southern United States (barring Virginia) to go blue was Georgia (rather than Florida or North Carolina, which were considered more blue than Georgia).

Ohio loses its 60-year streak of voting correctly with the nationwide presidential winner, pushing it, along with Iowa, gradually farther and farther out of the swing state column. Both Ohio and Iowa voted for Trump by about eight points, similar to 2016. It is likely that as the Rust Belt sees its population decline, we will see Ohio and Iowa move more and more to the right.

This was a really bad year for bellwethers: Vigo County, Indiana, and Valencia County, New Mexico, both ended their longtime bellwether streaks by voting for Donald Trump over Joe Biden. The new longest-lasting bellwether states are now Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, which voted with the correct winner since 2008 (yes, that is only 12 years and three elections). Clallam County, Washington, is now the only bellwether county left: it voted correctly with the winner since 1980.

Arizona and Georgia went to the President-Elect by narrow margins of less than 15,000 votes. This is the first time any of these states have voted Democrat in over two decades and marks the two states’ gradual leftward shift as the population explodes in the large metropolitan areas of Phoenix and Atlanta. Both of these cities’ suburbs single-handedly handed Joe Biden the victory here. Had suburbanites not voted Democrat in full-force, we would likely be seeing both states remain red. A Biden win in Georgia also opens up the door for the Democrats winning both of Georgia’s Senate runoff elections in January, which will decide which party ultimately ends up controlling the Senate. Georgia voted for Biden by 0.2 percent, an over five-point shift from 2016, while Arizona voted for Biden by 0.4 percent, a three-point shift from 2016.

Florida has moved to the right (again). The state voted for Trump by three percent (a two-point shift for Trump compared to 2016), likely in part due to strong Hispanic and Latino support for the GOP around the Miami-Dade area, an issue I briefly touched upon previously. Many majority-Hispanic counties swang wildly to the right compared to 2016, which allowed Donald Trump to expand his margin in the state. Surprisingly, the msot Democratic-leaning districts were ones that had an about equal mix of Hispanics and non-Hispanics. Again, the state’s rightward shift might push it farther out of the Democrats’ column and sight than, say, Georgia.

The same issue happened in Texas. Had Hispanics voted the same way they did in 2016, Biden would probably have won both Texas and Florida. Strong Hispanic support for the GOP in the border counties allowed Trump to win here, albeit by just a six-point margin compared to a nine-point margin in 2016.

White suburbanites and full-force turnout in large cities helped deliver Joe Biden the victory in the Rust Belt states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Biden won the states by 2.7, 0.7, and 0.6 percent respectively. And though this is a larger margin than that Trump won by four years ago, this is a major polling error from the polls, an issue which we will examine in-depth in a future post. Heavy turnout in the Democratic strongholds of Detroit, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, and Madison, Wisconsin, and support for Biden in the suburbs of these cities contributed heavily to the states flipping. Also, a lot of whites in these states shifted to the left.

North Carolina saw a heavy fight, with Trump edging out a 1.4 percent victory here. This is still a two-point leftward shift compared to 2016. And though Biden handily won, and shifted leftward, the cities in the Research Triangle region (Raleigh, Charlotte, Greensboro, Durham, etc.), it seems as though majority-Black counties shifted to the right. It is still unclear as to whether or not this was caused by Blacks actually shifting to the right, a large turnout among other groups in these counties, or other factors. This is a state that will especially require lots of in-depth analysis to surface before we can conclude what went wrong for the Democrats in this state.

All in all, this has been a pretty strange year. We have seen a nationwide blue and red wave collide together, delivering us a rather strange electoral map in which Georgia flips but not Florida or North Carolina. More in-depth post-election analysis of swing states will come soon.

Make sure to check out the 2020 election coverage page for more.