The map above shows what the 2020 US Presidential Election results would have been if votes not cast for Biden, Trump or one of the third party candidates had gone to fictional “Did Not Vote” candidate.
Disclaimer: This map is based on data up to November 11th, 2020. Votes are still being counted so totals are likely to change.
Unlike in 2016, when “Did Not Vote” would have won a landslide 471 electoral college votes, in 2020 it would have only eked out a slim victory with 278. (270 are required to win)
This due to much higher voter turnout. In 2020 voter turnout was 65.1%, the highest in a century and huge increase from 2016 when it was just 55.7%.
This means that Trump actually ended up getting millions more votes in 2020 than he did in 2016: 72.39 million vs 62.98 million (at last count).
However, the Democrats increased their vote share even more going from 65.85 million in 2016 to over 77.65 million in 2020.
Therefore, in 2016 Clinton would have got 51 electoral college votes where she did better than both Trump and non-voters, and Trump would have only managed to get 16.
In 2020, Biden would have tripled Clinton’s record with 162 votes and Trump would have increased his by 6 times going up to 98 votes.
Interestingly, in 2016 neither Trump (46.1%) nor Clinton (48.2%) won a majority of votes cast because of existence of third party candidates. In 2020, Biden won a majority (50.8%) of votes cast, but Trump also improved his share of the vote to 47.4%.
The data comes from United States Elections Project and the NYT 2020 election scraper.
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