Total ballots cast is listed here and shows 1,327,394. Your pic is showing just Biden and Trump votes and is already above the ballots cast number at 1,373,376. Add in 3rd vote party votes to get the 1,405,376 number from OP
made a slight improvement
Looking at NYT results, as you said they have 27 listed as tossups and Republicans won (or leading) all 27.
They have 26 listed as "Republicans expected to win narrowly". Republicans won all 26 of those. The closest was +6 percentage points. 19 were by +10 or more.
They have 36 listed as "Democrats expected to win narrowly". Republicans won 7 of those. Only 3 did Dems win by 10 or more points
I'm supposed to believe Trump lost?
Edit: Just noticed you linked an article and most of this is already mentioned there.
It's not true. Someone posted this above where you can see some other cities where Biden improved. I had started doing the same thing and quit when it was clear it wasn't true. Biden didn't even improve in Philly. 82.4% for Clinton, 81.3% for Biden. Trump went from 15.5% to 18.0%.
Maricopa County, which includes another large city in Mesa, had a bigger improvement for Biden than any of the 4 cities mentioned. Clinton to Biden went from 45.7% to 50.3% . Trump went from 49.1% to 48.1%. The claim is fake news though. Biden improved in lots of metro areas, and did not improve in Philadelphia
That image is enough to see this is fake news (the part about those 4 big cities being the only ones Biden didn't underperform Clinton). You can see from the image he performed better in other cities. I started doing the same for the 40 largest cities because like you I was annoyed at repeatedly seeing this claim with no data. San Diego improved for Biden. All the big cities in Texas improved for Biden except for El Paso. Huge improvement in Seattle. Detroit was barely an improvement. Philly actually improved for Trump, etc
I've actually seen them say "sources familiar with the White House's thinking". What the fuck is that even supposed to be? Houses can't think.