One thing I'm surprised more people are talking about is how despite many suburbs swinging hard left, many city centers like Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, Dallas, LA, ect, ect swung right. For the most part, these cities are so one sided that only winning a district 80-20 as opposed to 90-10 isn't going to make a difference, but if the GOP can continue to make gains in these city centers as Trump did, it might cancel out some of the suburban trend, and could potentially bring states like NY and IL into play down the road. What do you think?
I think this is way over-selling Republican prospects in cities.
Trump gained something like 2-5% in a lot of these cores (as stated elsewhere there was a lot of heterogeneity that had to do with race/income that somewhat cancelled each other out) while he lost double digits in suburbs. The suburban trend is clearer, more consistent over time, and much larger in magnitude than a one-off in cities. I need to see a larger shift before I get more concerned (and the Georgia runoff turnout in Fulton/DeKalb were very encouraging).
Even still, the city margins are still kinda deceptive. In most cities Biden and Trump
both gained over respective 2016 performances. Trump just happened to gain a little bit more, and through a statistical quirk from the fact that Trump's 2016 performance was in the toilet, an equivalent number of votes added to both sides naturally eats away at Democratic margins.
Example is Queens NY:
2020 26.9% 212,665 72.0% 569,038
2016 21.8% 149,341 75.4% 517,220
Trump gained 63K votes over his 2016 performance while Biden only gained 51K. That means Biden only lost 12.5K votes off of prior margins. That isn't really much to be concerned about, especially if you're pulling in huge gains in Westchester-type places. Plus, we have no idea who these fresh voters were and how likely they are to vote in the future. Add to that the fact that we really have no clue how much D turnout was hampered by lack of door knocking and shutting down social spaces typically used to register and/or drive out voters.
