New data has revealed that despite President Donald J. Trump's large, mostly maskless rallies leading up to the Nov. 3 election, he actually underperformed or lost the counties he was projected to win based on 2016 calculations.
The data was comprised of the last two weeks leading up to the 2020 election. According to NBC News, there were 30 Trump campaign stops in that period, including Arizona, Nebraska and Pennsylvania. In five counties that Trump visited he saw better results than he did in 2016, but in the remaining 25 his margins of victory got smaller, his margin of defeat grew or the county flipped Democratic.
The numbers raise questions about how journalists and analysts perceive campaigns - especially in the midst of a pandemic.
"Crowd sizes are often held out as a way to gauge support for a politician, and sometimes they are. But during a pandemic, with a polarizing candidate on the stump, it’s possible the meaning of the rallies were misread," NBC News reported. "While the crowds were visible sign of enthusiasm for Trump, there were much bigger, and less visible, groups of people who were not at the rallies and who may have seen them in a negative light."
Data showed that Trump held five events in the last two weeks of his campaign in Michigan and, in every one of those counties, his 2020 margins were worse than they were in 2016.
Pennsylvania showed a similar pattern with Trump holding seven events in the state in the last two weeks of the campaign. In every county Trump visited he did slightly worse than he did in 2016.
"To be clear, none of this is provable. These are correlations, not one-for-one causal relationships," NBC News reported. "Trump’s rallies may have helped him, even in the places where he underperformed in 2020. Maybe they prevented him from doing worse. But his margin losses in rally counties clearly hurt him in close states. And if the goal of all the barn-storming was to inspire and turnout the Trump base, the data at least suggest the rallies may have stirred the president’s opposition as well."
