-LOST all the counties Obama gained (CLAIM: “They want us to believe that Joe Biden won 200 fewer counties than Obama but somehow got 9 million more votes? I don’t think so…”
AP’S ASSESSMENT: Missing context. It’s true that President-elect Joe Biden received more votes than former President Barack Obama did in 2008, while winning fewer counties. Posts questioning Biden’s win based on these metrics lack the key context that the number of counties won does not correlate with the number of votes received nationwide.
THE FACTS: Data from The Associated Press shows that Biden won the presidential election with more than 81 million votes in 2020, but won just 527 of the United States’ 3113 counties.
Comparatively, in 2008, Obama won about 69 million votes, and 875 counties.
Social media users this week claimed it couldn’t possibly be true that Biden received more votes but won fewer counties than Obama, suggesting it must be a clue toward fraud or false reporting in this year’s election.
“They want us to believe that Joe Biden won 200 fewer counties than Obama but somehow got 9 million more votes? I don’t think so…” read a screenshot of a Twitter post shared more than 2,400 times on Facebook.
While that post’s numbers are slightly off, it’s true that Biden legitimately won more votes and fewer counties than Obama. That fact is not indicative of any significant fraud or irregularity, which election researchers have said was not detected in the 2020 election.
Jan Leighley, a political scientist at American University, told the AP the “supposed puzzle identified in these posts is an inappropriate/illogical comparison.”
“The claim implies that these two electoral outcomes (counties won and number of votes cast) should be highly correlated, or are even causal,” Leighley said in an email. “They are not—one is a measure of a geographical region vote, the other the number of votes cast.”
Counties across the United States vary dramatically in size, from populations of a few hundred people to several million. Trump won many smaller counties this year, while Biden pulled majorities in some of the nation’s largest counties, such as Los Angeles County in California and Maricopa County in Arizona.