2016 White and Non-White Vote by County Project

[Tartarus Sauce]

Interesting tidbit ... Orange County Whites remained Republican.  Shows the demographic change.

Just compared it to the 2012 white vote percentage, looks like Orange County Whites swung somewhere between 10-20% points towards the Democrats.

[Tartarus Sauce]

So I've been going back through this data and have noticed some trends that I didn't expect. Some examples:

Reno-Sparks metro Whites (41.7%) voted for Clinton more than Las Vegas metro Whites (39.1%). Genuinely no clue why this is.

Whites in Knox County (Knoxville) (29.7%) and Hamilton County (Chattanooga) (27.4%) voted more in favor of Clinton than Whites in Shelby County (Memphis) (26.7%). It's not by much in Chattanooga, but Knoxville Whites voted a full three percentage points more for Clinton than Whites in Memphis and its suburbs. I suppose the racial tensions in Memphis have something to do with the discrepancy.  

Whites in Hamilton County, OH (40.6%) voted more in favor of Clinton than Whites in Montgomery County, OH (36.8%). Perhaps not all that surprising, but probably the first time Cincinnati Whites voted to the left of Dayton Whites.

Whites in Sarasota County, FL (39.2%) voted more in favor of Clinton than Whites in Hillsborough County (37.8%). White's aren't exactly a liberal bunch along the Western coast of Florida, but I'm surprised that any county along the retiree-laden southwest coast managed to have its White population vote to the left of the Whites in the county where the Tampa Bay metro anchor is located, if for no other reason than out of consideration to the general rule of thumb that Whites in larger metros are more Democratic than Whites in nearby smaller metros unless there's a really obvious reason to the contrary (college towns, ski resorts, bohemian lifestyle communities, etc.).

Whites in Kent County, MI (38.6%) voted more in favor of Clinton than Whites in Macomb County (36.1%). Western Michigan is the historic stronghold of the GOP in Michigan, but Clinton took such a beating with the middle-class Whites in the Detroit metro area that Macomb County Whites actually voted more in favor of Trump than Whites in the Grand Rapids area which is slowly trending Democratic.

Whites in Fairfield County, CT (50.6%) voted more in favor of Clinton than Whites in New Haven County (45.8%). That's actually not that surprising, considering the upper class shift towards the Democrats nationwide compared to historical trends. What is surprising though is that Clinton did better with Whites in Tolland County (47.8%), New London County (46.6%), and Middlesex County (48.5%) than with Whites in New Haven County, despite the fact that they experienced the same White middle-class shift to Trump that New Haven County did, but are much more sparsely populated than New Haven County. Rural/small-town working/middle-class Whites generally shifted more in favor of Trump than those that came from larger urban areas, but of the aforementioned counties, the largest shift came from a county with 850,000 people in it and one of the state's largest metros.

Whites in St. Charles County, MO (30.9%) voted more in favor of Clinton than Whites in Jefferson County (28.6%). Hard to believe there was a time that Jefferson County would vote for a Black Democrat for President. What's not surprising is that Jefferson County has gone from a competitive swing county to safe Republican. What is surprising is that they managed to so rapidly outpace the conservative bona fides of St Charles County, which has long been a Republican fortress and didn't even trend Democrat in 2016.

Whites in Harvey County, KS (31.3%) voted more in favor of Clinton than Whites in Sedgwick County (27.7%). This one is particularly confusing because although Wichita isn't exactly known as a Democratic bastion, larger cities surrounded by deeply Republican rural areas will lean more Democratic than their environs by default. Newton isn't known for being a liberal small Kansas town, or to have much of anything that distinguishes it from other small Kansas towns as far as I'm aware, yet the Whites here voted around 3.5% more for Clinton than Whites in the much larger Wichita just to the south.

Whites in McLean County, IL (40.6%) voted more in favor of Clinton than Whites in Peoria County (39.5%). Worth noting that Clinton actually narrowly lost McLean County but won Peoria County, an obvious testament to the difference minority voters make. McLean County, despite being narrowly carried by Obama in 2008, more thoroughly resisted the Democratic trend much of the rest of non-Chicago north Illinois and mid-Illinois underwent in the post-Reagan years, after nearly a century and a half of being one of the most loyal Republican regions in the country. Now with much of downstate working and middle-class Whites reverting back to their Republican affiliation, McLean County could be poised to finally give in and start voting Democratic for the near future. Trump's crash in Bloomington-Normal compared to Romney is almost certainly due to the large academia presence centered around Illinois State, and Republicans will likely continue to perform poorly here nationally as long as the party is running on a Trumpist platfrom.

Whites in both Collin County (28.5%) and Denton County (26.8%) voted more in favor of Clinton than Whites in Tarrant County (25.1%). Dallas has always been known as being more liberal than Fort Worth, but the fact that Whites in Collin and Denton both voted for Clinton at a higher rate than Tarrant did is much more shocking. Fort Worth is, after all, the second largest city in the metroplex, and Collin and Denton are even more sprawly and less developed than Tarrant and Dallas and with smaller anchors. Yet Tarrant County was the least Democratic of the four. I would have assumed that whatever drove Tarrant's political profile would have been amplified the further out you went from the central Dallas-Fort Worth corridor, but apparently it actually becomes ever so slightly less conservative to the north.

[Tartarus Sauce]

Could we potentially get a reupload of this data? Screw Google for shafting Fusion Tables.

[Tartarus Sauce]

Biden won the white vote in Orange County, CA?!?! (Unless of course ‘white’ includes Hispanic whites.)

Orange County's electorate was estimated to be 56.2% Non-Hispanic White, 2.1% Non-Hispanic Black, 22.3% Hispanic, 16.8% Non-Hispanic Asian, and 2.6% Non-Hispanic Other.

Trump was estimated to have received the following shares among various groups:

NH White: 48.9%
NH Black: 6.5%
Hispanic: 36.0%
NH Asian: 45.5%
NH Other: 44.4%

Eyeballing precinct data, all of the non-white figures look right except for the Hispanic share - Trump did really badly among Orange County Hispanics compared to the model for some reason (he got about ~20% or so from what I can gather from monolithic Hispanic precincts, so assume he did a few points better than that county wide, as Hispanics living elsewhere are probably more GOP leaning).

If I manually change the estimated Trump support from Hispanics to, say, 25% and keep everything else the same, Trump wins Orange County whites by 9% under that calculation.

This discrepancy probably casts some doubt on Trump getting in the mid 30s nationwide among Hispanics as Catalist or the AP/NORC exit poll suggested. Edison may be closer on the mark with the low 30s. (My model assumed Trump got about 36% nationwide).

Ideally, once all matched 2020 precinct data is out, I could make a very accurate map, but that will take awhile. Until then, I'll try seeing what ad hoc adjustments I can do to make this more accurate. If anyone sees any other results that don't look quite right, let me know!

IIRC the zone of 30-40% R swings from 2016 extended deep into heavily Mexican/Latino Santa Ana and Anaheim. It was by no means limited to the Vietnamese enclaves in Garden Grove and Westminster.

I'm also guessing your Trump estimate for Black voters in Orange County is too low. But they don't make up a very high share of the OC electorate so it probably doesn't matter.

The Santa Ana Republican swings were largely sub-30, mostly between 10-25, Biden was still in the 60s and 70s throughout most of the city. The Anaheim swings were even less than that.