After over two weeks of counting ballots, the results of the 2020 Presidential Election are starting to settle. Former Vice President Joe Biden defeated incumbent President Donald J. Trump by a margin of 306-232 in the Electoral College. Here are six maps that break down the results from the election.
National dissatisfaction with the Trump presidency, primarily in its response and handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, contributed to Biden’s electoral victory. Forty-two states and Washington, D.C. saw a leftward shift during this cycle, most notably Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. These five states accounted for electoral votes, and went blue after going for Trump four years ago. One state that did not move left was Florida, where Hispanic voters broke towards Trump at a higher rate than they did during his first campaign. That being said, one key factor in this leftward shift was a spike in turnout across the country.
Nationally, there were roughly 22 million more ballots cast in 2020 than in 2016, which shakes out to an increase in turnout of approximately 7.2 percent. This was especially apparent in states like Hawai’i, Arizona, Montana and Washington where turnout increased by over 10.5% from 2016 in each of these states.
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, many states allowed their citizens to vote by mail. Universal mail-in voting had already been instituted in several states prior to this election cycle, and some of these states saw their 2016 turnout matched through mail-in voting alone. One of the key states to see a large increase in turnout through mail-in voting was Colorado.
The Centennial State had been a battleground state for several cycles, with former President Barack Obama winning in closely contested races in 2008 and 2012, before former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton won by 5 points in 2016. During the 2020 Election, however, Biden blew the state open, winning by approximately 13.5% on the tail of a statewide shift of 8.59 percentage points in favor of Democrats.
The rate at which ballots were returned shows a negative correlation with mail-in ballot turnout compared to 2016. This suggests that locations where ballots were returned at a high frequency likely requested fewer ballots and had more people vote on Election Day.
Following Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation to the U.S. Supreme Court, many Senate Republicans backtracked on the precedent set four years prior. Democrats hoped to take back control of the US Senate to avoid the possibility of another conservative justice being appointed. Many Republicans faced tough reelection opponents in 2020, which were only compounded by their connection to the increasingly unpopular Trump. As a result, the 2020 election cycle seemed to be the opportunity for which the DNC had been waiting.
Ultimately, nearly all of the Republican incumbents won back their seats, only losing two races in Arizona and Colorado, while picking up a seat in Alabama, with Georgia’s regular and special election still outstanding. When compared to the top of the ticket, Democratic candidates were outperformed by a margin of 1.1 percentage points.
While polling is not doomed or the bane of all evil, as some Twitter inhabitants may want to propagate, there is no doubt that it has an effect on the psyche of a potential voter. In regards to the Biden vs Trump race, states where FiveThirtyEight’s final polling average was within 5 points had a mail-in ballot return rate over 7.5% higher than states who’s polling average was greater than 20 points. Additionally, similar to the 2016 election, polls tended to favor Democrats, and overestimate their performances. On average, Trump won states by 1.1 percentage points, while the polls gave Biden an average of a 4.6 percentage point advantage.