R&I ~ Løki
(CNN)President Donald Trump continues to carry on with his unfounded charade claiming the election was wide-scale fraud. At the heart of many of his campaign’s complaints is that the big cities in the Great Lakes (Rust Belt) battleground states, such as Detroit and Philadelphia, helped to “engineer” a certain outcome.
What Trump and his campaign don’t seem to realize is that the cities (Detroit, Philadelphia and Milwaukee) in the three most important Great Lakes battlegrounds (Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin) were not responsible for President-elect Joe Biden’s improvement compared with Hillary Clinton.
Biden won in large part because of a dramatic improvement in the suburbs surrounding the major cities in these states.
Start off in Michigan and Detroit. Biden actually got about 1,000 fewer votes than Clinton in Detroit. Trump, meanwhile, got nearly 5,000 more votes. Given Trump received so few votes in Detroit, this was good enough for a 65% increase for Trump.
Then look at the counties surrounding Wayne County (where Detroit is located) as well as the places in Wayne outside of Detroit. Biden saw a 25% increase in his vote share, while Trump’s vote share increased by just 15%. That alone was worth a net of more than 120,000 votes for Biden’s margin over Trump compared with Clinton and 2016.
Given that Trump beat Clinton by a little more than 10,000 votes in Michigan, this was more than enough to swing the state to Biden.
Then there’s Pennsylvania, where Trump’s team has been going after Philadelphia’s vote count and Republican City Commissioner Al Schmidt without any evidence.
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Article URL : https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/17/politics/trump-suburbs-analysis/index.html