Yeah there was some "consider the particularities of the Texas Hispanic population" article some people told me to read, it looked interesting but I think we need to admit this is what happened.
(I should read it though, it did look interesting, but I was like, what about Maricopa County, Chicago, Lawrence Massachusetts, Bridgeport, the Bronx, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, almost everywhere you can see a big red splotch on the precinct swing map or whatever.)
You are right that just because there was a general pattern doesn't mean there weren't interesting shifts within that pattern.
If the pre-election polls say one thing but the results another, that's one story. But if the pre-election polls and what ecological evidence we have both say Trump had a significant swing with Hispanic voters and maybe a small one with Black voters, well, maybe it's true.
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Conceptually it's a little tricky b/c of superspreader events. Let's say there's a basement party or something and 200 people get infected. Then each of them infect 4 new people at work. 1000 people are infected now, how many "because of work", how many "because of the party"?
Well most directly, 800 people were infected at work, 200 people were infected at the party. That makes it seem like work is the main factor. But in another sense, without the party, maybe nobody gets infected, so maybe the social event is the main factor.
And then it's like, what kind of transmission is it easier for policy changes, behavioral changes, etc, to stop, and that's a whole different tricky conversation.
But Michigan as a whole cast 115% of its 2016 vote or so, and it's not like Clinton's raw margin in Detroit was anything spectacular, Democrats fretted about it for four years!
My sanity check is, "imagine if these Philadelphia/Detroit/Milwaukee numbers were the first things out on Tuesday November 3rd". I don't think Democrats would have had a happy time waiting for more results...
Via @ElectProject estimates, boy, relative turnout by state is really pretty stable, huh.
Here's just the last two:
The earliest on @ElectProject is 2000, let's see there. Well, you can definitely see that some states were the belles of the ball in 2020 more than in 2000, perhaps.