This 2016 map doesn’t say what Donald Trump thinks it does
During an event on school prayer on Thursday in the Oval Office, CNN’s Betsy Klein spotted something interesting out on President Donald Trump’s desk. It was a map.
A county-by-county map of the 2016 election results, to be exact. (The 2016 election was 1,165 days ago. But who’s counting!) It’s a map that Trump — as well as his son Donald Trump Jr. — regularly turn to as a way to suggest his dominance in the last election. In October 2019, for example, Trump tweeted the county-by-county map — incorrectly, it turns out! — with the words “Try to impeach this” written over it.
You can see why Trump likes the map so much. There’s loads of red (signifying counties that voted for him) and a relatively small amount of blue (counties Hillary Clinton won) on it. Visually, it makes it looks like Trump won a red wave election in 2016.
Which, from a county perspective, he did! Trump won 2,626 counties to Clinton’s 487 in the last presidential election, according to the Associated Press.
But that data point — and the county-by-county map it powers — is deeply deceiving. Why? A very simple reason: Land doesn’t vote, people do.
What the county-by-county map doesn’t show is that very few people live in lots and lots of those red counties. And tons of people live in the blue counties. Remember that the same map Trump loves so much produced this popular vote result in 2016, according to the FEC:
Hillary Clinton: 65,853,516 votes
Donald Trump: 62,984,825 votes
Which is why, when you allow for actual population in the country, the map looks a lot different. This one, by cartoonist Randall Munroe on his XKCD website, is a much more accurate depiction of what the 2016 election actually looked like.
As you can see from that map, the population centers of the country are on the east and west coasts — and they tend to favor Democrats. The middle of the country is much more Republican — and much more sparsely populated.
Does Trump understand how misleading and deceptive his map is? Impossible to know. But what we do know is that he doesn’t care. The map — and we know Trump is a sucker for visual aids — tells the story he likes and wants to believe: That the vast majority of the country is for him and the coastal elites are just small little slivers of dissent within a broader Trump lovefest.
That, of course, is false. What the map Trump so loves really shows is that there are large areas of the country where not that many people live. And in those less populated areas, Trump won. That’s it.
