Going into the November general election, a race that has yielded a stream of unexpected storylines, we can learn from the results of the 2020 election, a contest that set voting records and upended norms. More than 158 million Americans cast a ballot in the 2020 race, continuing a trend of higher turnout rates.
The following maps were the result of a post-election USA TODAY analysis in November 2020 that looked at county-level returns, historical results by state, shifts in voting from the 2016 election and record-high voter turnout in 2024.
During the 2020 election, most counties split between Biden and Trump. Rather than showing strictly red or blue, a shade of purple represents how votes were cast. Fewer than 600 out of about 3,000 counties, not including Alaska, voted over 80% in favor of either candidate.
A countywide results map only tells part of the story when some counties have far more people than others. In the map below, circles are sized according to the number of votes separating the candidates in each county, and they're colored red or blue based on which candidate won the county. Trump won by small numbers of votes in many places, while Biden won by much larger vote margins in fewer counties.
2020 had the highest voter turnout in over a century.
Over 159 million votes were cast in the 2020 general election , with Biden receiving over 81 million — the most ever received by a presidential candidate. Most counties had a higher turnout than in 2016, including many in the battleground states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia.
Trump won in 2016 thanks to an increasing share of Republican votes in many counties, particularly in the Midwest. In 2020, many counties showed growth in the Republican share of votes, however many other counties shifted back toward Democrats, especially in key battleground states like Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia.
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