How Did Trump Perform Relative To Other GOP Candidates?

One interesting twist to the 2020 General Election results was that Senator David Perdue received more votes than President Trump did. Usually, there is a drop off of votes cast as you move down the ballot. This certainly happened on the Democratic side of the ballot as candidate Jon Ossof received fewer votes than Biden.

I decided to dig a little deeper in the numbers and found that not only did Perdue outperform Trump, so did several of the GOP congressional candidates. Anecdotal evidence suggests several Republican State Senators and State Representatives received more votes in their district that Trump did.

This map shows the counties were Perdue and/or the GOP Congressional candidate received more votes than the President. Counties in red are where the GOP Congressional candidate outperformed Trump. Blue are counties where Perdue outperformed Trump, and purple counties are where both Perdue and the GOP Congressional candidate outperformed.

I then wondered if this was different than Georgia’s results in 2016. As I dug into the data I found that there were many more counties where GOP Congressional candidates outperformed Trump, most notably across the northernmost parts of the state.

What does all this mean? Trump gained relative to other Republican candidates as his popularity within the Party increased. Many Republicans were skeptical of Trump in 2016, but he was able to put together a coalition of pro-Trump and anti-Clinton voters large enough to win. 2020 of course, was a different matter, as underperforming both Perdue and several GOP Congressional candidates cost him the state.

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