Donald Trump's favorite map is deeply misleading

Here we go again.

Yes, I know it’s Sunday. And that you are probably watching the NFL conference championships. But, sometimes something just sticks in my craw. And I have to get it out.

Today, I was perusing Truth Social — I know, I know — and I came across this post, which Donald Trump has, uh, re-Truthed:

The original post is from Trump’s one-time political svengali — and full-time rabble rouser — Steve Bannon.

And the message is alluringly simply: The 2020 map is SO SO red that “America is Trump Country.”

It’s part and parcel of the broader message Trump has pushed since that election: He got 74 million votes — WAY more than he received in 2016. And look at that map! I mean, come on! He really won! Must have!

Here’s the problem: The map, which shows county-by-county performance in the 2020 election is deeply misleading (at least the way Trump is using it). And it’s far from the first time that Trump has used a county-by-county map to prove his broader (and false) points.

Back in 2019, Trump tweeted this:

Again, same deal — except that was the 2016 county map.

The maps are both accurate — as far as they go. In 2020, Trump won 2,497 counties in to Joe Biden’s 477 counties. In 2016, Trump won 2,626 counties to Hillary Clinton’s 487.

The problem arises when Trump and his allies try to use these type of maps to somehow prove that a) the country is overwhelmingly Republican and b) that Trump “really” won the election — by a lot.

The most important thing to remember when looking at the two maps above is this: Land doesn’t vote. The VAST majority of the counties that turn these maps into seas of red have VERY few people in them. Winning counties with a few hundred or even a few thousand people in them may look good on a map — there’s red everywhere! — but they don’t do anything to change this basic fact: The majority of the American population lives on the two coasts of the country.

This map, done by the cartoonist Randall Munroe on his xkcd.com site, is a FAR better representation of what the 2020 election actually looked like:

And, just to reinforce that fact, remember that this is what the popular vote looked like in 2020:

Biden 81,282,916 (51.3%)

Trump 74,223,369 (46.9%)

Biden won. Comfortably.

It’s worth noting here that Biden’s 4-point popular vote margin translated into a narrower 306-232 win in the electoral college. Which reinforces the fact that the electoral college does have a Republican lean at this point — and that if Biden wants to win a second term, he is probably going to have to win the popular vote by at least 3 points.

But, that’s not really the point here. That point is that Trump and his allies are, again, trying to mislead — using a catchy image (the map is SO red!!!) and hoping that people don’t dig any deeper into the picture.

When you do that, you realize that the county-by-county map (of any election) doesn’t reveal much other than that there are a LOT of very small (in terms of population) counties who vote consistently Republican.

And that’s it. There’s nothing more to be learned from that map. No matter what Trump and his people say.