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Just a few months into his presidency, Donald Trump sat down with some reporters from Reuters, and the discussion turned to U.S. policy toward China. The Republican, for reasons that weren’t altogether clear, interrupted the Q&A to hand out blue-and-red copies of the 2016 electoral map, broken down by county.
“Here, you can take that, that’s the final map of the numbers,” the then-president said from his desk, handing copies to each of the three reporters in the room. “It’s pretty good, right? The red is obviously us.”
Among Republicans, this was not uncommon. County-by-county electoral maps, when seen from a distance, tend to show a United States in which the GOP dominates, which makes the images quite popular in conservative circles. They also tend to generate reminders about how deeply flawed they are — the maps suggest land masses matter more than actual American voters — though Republicans have a habit of brushing past the relevant details, which they consider inconvenient.
This week, a Democrat made the same mistake.
Rep. Dean Phillips is still running a longshot presidential primary campaign, and as part of his efforts in New Hampshire, the Minnesotan apparently attended a Trump event in the hopes of connecting with some of the Republican’s supporters. When this generated some pushback, Phillips posted this item to social media:
The message at the heart of such a pitch is pretty straightforward. As the Democratic congressman sees it, the United States has gone “red,” so his party should be doing more to appeal to conservative voters.
For now, let’s put aside one of Phillips’ glaring mistakes: He appears to have used a map from 2016, instead of the most recent presidential election cycle.
Instead, let’s set the record straight about a simple truth that’s too often overlooked: Land doesn’t vote.
Imagine a family owns an acre of land, a small part of which includes their house. Then imagine members of the family are going to hold an election, with five people voting one way from within the house, while two people vote the opposite way from outside.
A map showing the results might feature the house in blue and the outdoors in red, and someone casually looking at the map might assume that the family's election results were lopsided in favor of red. After all, it would be the dominant color. But what matters are the people, not the land masses.
Similarly, many of the areas shown on a county-by-county map of the United States have a lot of square miles and very few people, just as other areas have large populations in dense urban areas. The result is a distorted image: Republicans do well in wide-open areas, but that doesn't tell us much about the broader direction of the country.
Presumably, someone who works in electoral politics would know this.
To be sure, if Dean Phillips wants to seek Democratic votes by talking to Trump voters, that’s his business. It’s a curious strategy in a primary race, but I’m not a campaign strategist, and it’s not my job to give him or anyone else tactical advice.
But if the congressman wants to make the case that the United States has turned “so red,” and his evidence is a misleading, eight-year-old map, a revised approach appears to be in order.