There was a debate in the runup to this year’s presidential election about whether it’d be a base election or a persuasion one. In other words, what would matter more for a candidate — turning out one side’s core voters, or winning over undecideds and wavering supporters of President Trump?
Based on an NPR analysis of the more than 3,000 counties across the country, it was, in fact, mostly a base election with some key persuasion in Democratic-leaning suburbs that went for Joe Biden by wider margins than for Hillary Clinton in 2016.
In 2020, there have been far fewer counties that flipped from one major party to the other, as compared with four years earlier. In 2016, 237 counties changed allegiances from 2012 — 216 of them went from former President Barack Obama to Trump.
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