Why Trump’s Favorite 2016 Map Should Scare Him

This week, as President Donald Trump went on the offensive to bolster his case against impeachment, he tweeted a county-by-county map of the 2016 presidential race that showed a vast sea of red interrupted only by a few blue inlets, mostly along the coasts. The map, captioned with the headline “Try to Impeach This,” documented the measure on which Trump performed best: He won over 2,600 counties, while Hillary Clinton carried fewer than 500. …

Trump’s fixation with the county map, showed how he equates geography with the size of his coalition. While counties that supported Trump accounted for fully 85 percent of the nation’s landmass, according to calculations by The New York Times, he won just under 46 percent of the total votes cast in 2016. Clinton’s counties covered only 15 percent of the nation’s landmass, but she won 48 percent of the vote. In other words, despite Trump’s cartographic claims of political dominance, dirt doesn’t vote.

Yet that doesn’t mean the county map is irrelevant to 2020. From the inverse perspective, it illuminates the growing correlation between population density and political preference captured by the population map. CONT.

Ronald Brownstein, The Atlantic