Both Parties Got More Votes This Year: That’s a Challenge for Visualizing Results
Often, visualizations about election data focus on the margin of victory (the gap between a winner and loser) and share (what percent of the electorate a candidate captured).
But 2020 was a very high turnout election. And such elections create some quirks in how we visualize election results.
For instance, many popular maps focus on changes to vote margin. So a red area is one where Republicans improved on their margin and a blue area is one where Democrats improved on their margin. But that focus on change can obscure who actually won in each of these counties. For instance, if Democrats win a county by 70% in 2016 but by only 60% in 2020, it shows up red on such maps, even if each party ultimately turned out more voters in that county.
Historically, we would think about a shift in margin like that as being largely comprised of people switching their votes since it’s from a relatively stable pool of “regular” voters. But elections are a lot more complex than that anyway and this election, in particular, featured lots of new voters, too. We won’t know the full story for many months as states update their voting records and analysts and political scientists are able to do more research.
