Donald Trump Won 7.5 Million Popular Vote Landslide in Heartland 

Donald Trump Won 7.5 Million Popular Vote Landslide in Heartland

University of Michigan

by Michael Patrick Leahy15 Nov 2016

Donald Trump won an overwhelming 7.5 million popular vote victory in 3,084 of the country’s 3,141 counties or county equivalents in America’s heartland.

Fifty-five point seven million out of the 109.3 million Americans who cast their ballots in those counties voted for Trump, while only 48.1 million voted for Hillary Clinton, according to the latest county by county election results reported at Politico. The remaining 5.4 million voted for other candidates.
Trump’s 7.5 million popular vote landslide in America’s heartland, a resounding 7 point victory in those 3,084 counties over Clinton, 51 percent to 44 percent, gave him a 306 to 232 Electoral College landslide. (On Monday night, the director of elections in the office of Michigan’s Secretary of State said that Trump had won the state’s 16 electoral college votes by a narrow margin of 13,107 votes.)
Hillary Clinton, in contrast, had an 8.2 million vote margin in a narrow band of 52 coastal counties and five “county equivalent” cities stretching from San Diego to Seattle on the West Coast and Northern Virginia to Boston on the East Coast. That narrow band included two major cities–Washington, D.C and Baltimore, Maryland–included in the five “county equivalent” cities, and three major cities–Philadelphia, New York, and Boston–which are included in the 52 counties.
Clinton received 70 percent of the 18.4 million votes cast in these 52 elite coastal counties. Donald Trump, in contrast, received only 25 percent of the vote in these counties. The remaining 5 percent went to other candidates.
In elite coastal county after elite coastal county, especially those in Washington, D.C. and its Virginia and Maryland suburbs where so many federal government workers and federal contractors live, Clinton won by margins ranging from four to one to two to one.
Votes cast in the 52 elite coastal counties where Clinton dominated accounted for only 14.4 percent of the estimated 127.7 million total votes cast in the country.
In contrast, the 3,084 counties in America’s heartland, where Trump dominated with a healthy 7 point margin, accounted for 85.6 percent of all votes cast.
Clinton’s 671,066 popular vote margin across the entire country, 61,047,027 votes to Donald Trump’s 60,375,961 votes (according to Politico’s election results website as of Tuesday morning) arose from this huge advantage wracked up in these elite coastal counties.
Clinton received 47.7 percent of the estimated 127.7 million votes cast nationwide, while Trump received 47.2 percent of those votes. Five percent went to other candidates.
Trump campaigned very little in the 23 elite coastal counties in the West Coast states of California, Oregon, and Washington, and only vigorously campaigned in five Northern Virginia counties and Philadelphia on the East Coast.
It is worth noting that virtually all members of the mainstream media reside within this narrow band of elite coastal counties.
Clinton won the 161 electoral college votes in nine of these ten states, as well in the District of Columbia. Among these ten states, Trump won only Pennsylvania and its 20 electoral college votes.
But these nine states experienced the same kind of bimodal divide seen in the rest of the country.
In eight of these nine states (all but Massachusetts) Trump was tied or slightly ahead of Clinton in the popular vote in those counties outside the coastal elite.
Here is the full list of these 52 elite coastal counties:
(California: Alameda, Contra Costa, Humboldt, Los Angeles, Marin, Mendocino, Monterey, Napa, Sacramento, San Diego, San Francisco, San Luis Obispo, San Mateo, Santa Barbara, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz, Solano, Sonoma, and Ventura; Oregon: Multnomah and Washington; Washington: King and Snohomish; Virginia: Arlington, Fairfax, Loudoun, and Prince William (and the cities of Alexandria, Fairfax, and Falls Church); Washington, D.C.; Maryland: Baltimore, Charles, Howard, Montgomery, and Prince George’s (and the city of Baltimore); Pennsylvania: Delaware and Philadelphia; New Jersey: Essex, Hudson, Mercer, Middlesex, Passaic, and Union; New York: Bronx, Kings, New York, Queens, and Westchester; Connecticut: Fairfield, Hartford, and New Haven; and Massachusetts: Essex, Middlesex, Norfolk, and Suffolk.)