The New York Times published a nifty little map that allows you to drill down into last November’s presidential election results on a precinct-by-precinct level. The tool offers the most detailed election results I’ve seen to date, and there is some interesting new insight that can be gleaned from it.
Unsurprisingly, the city largely went for Biden. What is more interesting, however, is the data on margins. Southern Dallas voted most heavily for the new president, with Biden topping Trump by margins of around 90 percent. Perhaps more significantly, North Dallas precincts that voted for Trump did not do so by very large margins. Scrolling across some Far North Dallas precincts, and you can see that Biden managed to pick up 40-45 percent of the vote in predominantly conservative districts. The districts that went most heavily for Trump were in the Park Cities, but there are also pockets of Trumplandia around town, most notably in Northwest Dallas.
The most interesting thing about the map is that it allows you to see how the vote swung between 2016 and 2020. While the southern part of the city did strongly support Democrat candidates in both elections, voters swung more toward Trump in 2020. That bears out the point that has been made since November that the former president managed to win over more Hispanic and African American voters this time around. Similarly, more White and conservative neighborhoods in North Dallas swung Democrat in 2020.
Other curious standouts: Dallas Baptist University is a red island in a blue southwest Dallas sea. Fort Worth is becoming more blue, but red districts still dominate the northern half of the city and inner-ring suburbs. And it’s disappointing that the map does not have data for Collin County. Although we knew before the election that Dallas would vote solidly for the Democrat candidate, the story of the election was largely about swing voters in the suburbs. Hopefully that info gets updated at some point. For now, we can see that Biden did perform strongly in Dallas’ inner-ring suburbs.
