(This info is for Placer County, CA)
Hello everyone, I have some data I'd like to share with you here. My local county is deep Republican in a state that is deep blue. We despise our governor's onerous lockdown restrictions, and our local county board of supervisors voted unanimously to end the local state of emergency and refuses to enforce the state's restrictions.
In 2016, we voted for the POTUS by a 10 point margin, 52.5%-41.2%, there was a sizeable libertarian presence at 4.9%. The margin of victory was approximately 16,000 votes, which for a county of about 390,000 is not insignificant.
In 2020, you look at the county results, and what do you see? With 76% of the vote in, the results are 51.2-46.9% BIDEN. That's right, in a deep red county that despises the governor and lockdowns, gained 10 points over the President. Despite the fact we had several Trump rallies, countless flags, stickers, and voter registrations, Joe Biden who hates guns and wants lockdowns, somehow did what Obama and Hillary Clinton could not: Flip one of the reddest counties in the state.
Here are the vote counts for you to investigate: 2016: 78,000-62,000 Trump/Clinton 2020: 81,500-75,000 Biden/Trump (76% counted)
I did the math, and if Trump receives about 57-60% of the remaining ballots, he can still overcome the Biden lead. But it is incredibly suspect that a county that was strongly Republican (we have no cities where Democrats have a registration advantage) could flip so much.
Democratic U.S. Senator Tina Smith is now in a dogfight to keep her Senate seat after her once double-digt lead dwindled to a one-point lead in our latest KSTP/SurveyUSA poll. Smith leads Republican challenger Jason Lewis 43% to 42%, with 12% undecided. Another three percent favor other candidates.
I considered two things: Bay Area transplants and COVID response. The former isn't large enough to swing the election this hard in one cycle (midterms we voted for Cox by a substantial margin), and the latter just doesn't make sense because we don't really take COVID as seriously. Our local county health officer even quit due to how we wanted to prioritize opening the economy and getting kids back to school. So there's no proper explanation, other than waiting and seeing if the remaining 50,000 votes break hard for the GOP.