The 5 maps above show data relating to how the counties of the lower 48 states (and DC) have voted across the last six presidential elections. I decided not to include Alaska and Hawaii data, primarily because Alaska has had a number of county boundary changes since 2000. If I had wanted to include Alaska and Hawaii, I could have followed the instructions in this post.
The bulk of the election data comes from MEDSL, with additional 2020 data from VEST used to fill in some of the gaps in MEDSL’s file. For each county, I retrieved vote totals for the following six Presidential elections:
– 2000: Bush vs. Gore
– 2004: Bush vs. Kerry
– 2008: McCain vs. Obama
– 2012: Romney vs. Obama
– 2016: Trump vs. Clinton
– 2020: Trump vs. Biden
The first four maps group counties into categories I found interesting:
– Counties that supported for a candidate of the same party in every election
– Counties that began the 2000s voting Democratic and have voted Republican since (only flipping once)
– Counties that began the 2000s voting Republican and have voted Democratic since (only flipping once)
– Counties that supported Republicans in every election, except for Obama at least once
The above four categories do not encompass every county (3,108) in the contiguous United States + DC, but only 2,954. Information on the counties not included is shown below.
The number of counties with a specific Presidential voting pattern not included in those 4 maps is included below. Counties included above contain a strikethrough. Broomfield, CO is excluded from the data as it did not exist in 2000. For simplicity, I did not try to modify the 2000 election results for the counties that previously contained the area of Broomfield.
'Republican': 2064, 'Democratic': 343, "Rep. except Obama '08": 120,'Democratic until 2016': 90, 'Democratic until 2004': 88, 'Republican until 2004': 68, 'Rep. except Obama twice': 49, 'Democratic until 2008': 39, 'Republican until 2020': 31,'Rep: Bush (second), Romney, 2 x Trump': 26, 'Republican except for Kerry, 2 x Obama ': 23,'Republican until 2016': 22,'Rep: Bush (second), 2 x Trump': 20,'Democratic until 2012': 19,'Republican except for Obama (first), Biden': 13, 'Democratic except Trump first term': 12, 'Republican except for Obama (first), Clinton, Biden': 10, 'Democratic except Bush second term': 10,'Democratic until 2020': 10,'Republican except for 2 x Obama, Biden': 9,'Republican until 2012': 6,'Rep: Bush (second), McCain, 2 x Trump': 6, 'Republican except Kerry, Obama (first)': 5,"Rep. except Obama '12": 5,'Republican except for Kerry, 2 x Obama, Biden': 4, 'Republican except for 2 x Obama, Clinton': 3, 'Rep Bush (second), Trump (second)': 3, 'Republican except for Obama (second), Biden': 3, 'Republican except for Kerry': 3, 'County Boundaries Changed': 1, 'Democratic except Romney first term': 1, 'Rep Bush (second), Trump (first)': 1, 'Rep: McCain, 2 x Trump': 1
The fifth map looks at how many times each county had majority support for the winning Presidential candidate in these 6 elections. Interestingly, no county voted for the losing candidate in every Presidential election from 2000-2020 and 9 counties have supported the winning candidate in every one. Broomfield County is not included here, so there are only 3,107 counties.
0 winners: 0 counties 1 winner: 40 counties 2 winners: 121 counties 3 winners: 2543 counties 4 winners: 256 counties 5 winners: 138 counties 6 winners: 9 counties
Note: This post contains an updates to the maps I had previously shared in these two posts (2000 – 2016 and 2000 – 2020).