Is the Swing to Trump in LA, NYC,etc. overhyped?

[Intell]

I’d say yes


Romney did better than trump in all sorts of areas where Trump saw gains

This is just wrong.

[Tartarus Sauce]

Severely overhyped. Not only do Republicans continue to get absolutely pummeled in the inner cities despite the gains, but the only state where major metro gains significantly shifted the net margins for Republicans were in Florida. It did jack squat for them anywhere else in terms of nudging deep blue states away from the safe Democratic column, while in most other states the gains in inner city precincts were miniscule to non-existent. Republicans are no closer to actually dislodging Democratic urban machines than they were before.

He did the best in NYC since Bush in 2004? Fascinating baseball statistic, but he still lost the city by a 53 point margin. He made gains in minority LA neighborhoods? Would be more noteworthy if not for the fact that he managed to still do slightly worse than both McCain and Romney countywide.

The swings are surprising in terms of the fact that it was Trump who managed to improve upon his 2016 performance in places that utterly despised him, not because they were significant enough to actually change the political calculus of electioneering. The urban swings were ineffectual and inconsistent, not anywhere near as impressive a feat as the swings he managed to generate throughout rural America in 2016, which had far more salient electoral impacts.

[VAR]

Yes, especially since many are very circumstantial given Rs already incredibly low #s in these areas and the fact that Ds were hurt by the lack of in person canvassing.

Even if COVID wasn't a thing, why would Democrats waste time and energy canvassing in New York or LA?

NY-11, CA-25, NY-01, NY-02, CA-48, CA-39, etc. Were competitive, not to mention countless local elections that were competitive.

Uh, none of these districts are in NYC and/or LA proper, with the possible exception of NY-11.

[Kamala's side hoe]

The swings are surprising in terms of the fact that it was Trump who managed to improve upon his 2016 performance in places that utterly despised him, not because they were significant enough to actually change the political calculus of electioneering. The urban swings were ineffectual and inconsistent, not anywhere near as impressive a feat as the swings he managed to generate throughout rural America in 2016, which had far more salient electoral impacts.

If Trump improved by that much in urban/suburban Latino and Asian enclaves, I wonder what would've happened if it was Rubio seeking reelection during COVID-19.

At the subgroup level, Democrats gained somewhere between half a percent to one percent among non-college whites and roughly 7 percent among white college graduates (which is kind of crazy). Our support among African Americans declined by something like one to 2 percent. And then Hispanic support dropped by 8 to 9 percent. The jury is still out on Asian Americans. We’re waiting on data from California before we say anything. But there’s evidence that there was something like a 5 percent decline in Asian American support for Democrats, likely with a lot of variance among subgroups. There were really big declines in Vietnamese areas, for example. Anyway, one implication of these shifts is that education polarization went up and racial polarization went down.

In other words, a voter’s level of educational attainment — whether they had a college degree — became more predictive of which party they voted for in 2020 than it had been in 2016, while a voter’s racial identity became less predictive?


Yeah. White voters as a whole trended toward the Democratic Party, and nonwhite voters trended away from us. So we’re now somewhere between 2004 and 2008 in terms of racial polarization. Which is interesting. I don’t think a lot of people expected Donald Trump’s GOP to have a much more diverse support base than Mitt Romney’s did in 2012. But that’s what happened.

It's only surprising because Trump was the GOP incumbent. This wouldn't have been surprising with any other R nominee.