Did Biden or Trump win your SoCal city?
New numbers show size matters in voting patterns
Take a polarized electorate, add historically high voter turnout and bake in months, if not years, of campaigning and you’ll get a pretty good idea of how a city voted in the 2020 presidential election.
For the most part, whether Joe Biden or Donald Trump won a city in the Inland Empire hinged largely on that city’s voter registration.
Cities with a plurality or
majority of Democrats tended to go for Biden, while red cities went to Trump, according to results recently released by the California Secretary of State’s office.
Biden, like Hillary Clinton, won Los Angeles, Riverside and San Bernardino counties as part of a decisive victory in California. But he also picked up six cities that Trump won in 2016.
Here’s a closer look at the Inland presidential election results.
Some city results show extremes
Blue cities voted for Biden and red cities voted for Trump. But in some cases, cities overwhelmingly voted for one of the two.
Take Canyon Lake, for example. Going into last November, the southwest Riverside County city of roughly 12,000 already had the highest percentage of Republican-registered voters of any city in Riverside County or San Bernardino County.
Come election time, Canyon Lake gave Trump his third highest-vote share of any city in California. About 75% of Canyon Lake voters chose Trump, trailing only the Kern County cities of Maricopa — 80.1% — and Taft — 79.5%.
For Biden, his highest vote shares in the region came in Coachella and Palm Springs, where he won 78.1% and 77.5% of the vote, respectively. Those weren’t Biden’s highest vote shares in the state. He got 93.8% of the vote in Berkeley, for example.
The Inland Empire is also home to one of the narrowest vote margins between Biden and Trump. In Hemet, where registered Democrats outnumbered their GOP counterparts by about 1,200 voters, Biden beat Trump by just 148 votes, making it one of six California cities where the margin between the two candidates was less than 1%.
Support clustered in geographic areas
Numbers also show that support for Biden and Trump tended to be clustered. If either candidate won a city, chances are he won its neighbors.
For example, Biden picked up Riverside, Moreno Valley, Perris, Eastvale, Jurupa Valley and Corona along with San Bernardino, Ontario, Rancho Cucamonga, Rialto, Grand Terrace, Highland and Redlands as well as Claremont, Montclair, San Dimas, Pomona, Diamond Bar and Chino.
Trump won Temecula, Murrieta, Canyon Lake, Wildomar, and Menifee along with Yucaipa, Calimesa and Beaumont.
There are exceptions. Norco went to Trump despite its neighbors favoring Biden, and Trump also won Indian Wells despite Biden’s success in other parts of the Riverside County desert.
Candidates carried urban or rural areas
Like the rest of the nation, there’s a clear link between population density and election results.
In general, the more people a city had, the higher the likelihood it went to Biden, who won the biggest cities in L.A., Riverside and San Bernardino counties. Trump did better in smaller cities — although Temecula and Murrieta each have more than 100,000 residents — and he won the unincorporated parts of Riverside and San Bernardino counties, which represent about 15% of both counties’ populations.
Results differ from 2016 election
While a majority of the Inland region voted for the Democratic candidate in both the 2016 and 2020 elections, Biden outperformed Clinton.
He flipped six Inland cities where Trump had won in 2016: Palm Desert, Hemet, La Quinta, Banning, La Verne and Lake Elsinore.
Of the 18 Inland cities that Trump won both years, he got a higher percentage of the vote in 2020 than 2016 in half of them. In order, he gained the most in Blythe, then Norco, Barstow, Needles, Wildomar, Yucaipa, Canyon Lake, Hesperia and Calimesa. He lost the most support, in order, in Indian Wells, Twentynine Palms, Yucca Valley, Temecula, Murrieta, Big Bear Lake, Menifee, Apple Valley and Beaumont.
Both Biden and Clinton won 33 Inland cities. The ones where Biden saw the greatest gains compared to Clinton were Rancho Mirage, Palm Springs, Redlands and Grand Terrace. A dozen cities voted more strongly for Clinton in 2016 than Biden in 2020, led by Coachella, Perris, Fontana and Rialto.
Renée Van Vechten, a University of Redlands political science professor, said what struck her was how little most cities’ results changed even though 2020 had much higher turnout than 2016.
That also was true in unincorporated areas, Van Vechten said, noting that Trump’s margin of victory barely changed from 2016 to 2020 in unincorporated San Bernardino County even though turnout rose from roughly 99,000 voters in 2016 to more than 121,000 last year.
What does it all mean?
Last November’s results point to a troubling trend for the GOP in the Inland Empire, said Shaun Bowler, a UC Riverside political science professor.
“If you had the (Inland) map from, say, 20 or 30 years ago, you’d see much more red,” Bowler said via email. “The GOP has moved from being a dominant party in the area to being a very definite minority.”
Patterns of red and blue will “ebb and flow” over the next few elections, Bowler said.
The possible recall of Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, for example, “will likely be a bit more red,” he said. “But … the tide of blue has risen and will be around for a while because the Democrats have been more successful in proposing policies that people want than the GOP has.”
With Republicans seemingly more concerned about ideological purity than policy, “That kind of politics may help a candidate win primaries and raise money but it doesn’t win statewide,” Bowler added. “The GOP keeps fighting within itself over who is the most conservative (but) it is a fight taking place among a smaller and smaller number of people.”
Marcia Godwin, a professor of public administration at the University of La Verne, said via email it’s “striking how much the Inland Valley areas — eastern Los Angeles County, western San Bernardino County, and western Riverside (County) — have become a sea of blue. Only the city of Norco remains deeply red.”
That said, “We should be careful, though, not to overlook that there are several communities that went narrowly for Biden that are very divided in terms of partisanship,” Godwin said. “They include San Dimas, La Verne, Upland and Rancho Cucamonga that all had vocal Trump supporters and some residents placing Trump signs in their front yards — now shifting to Recall Newsom.”
Following “extraordinarily high voter turnout” in 2020, “in a post-Trump election, results might shift back a bit towards the Republicans even as overall partisanship has trended Democratic,” Godwin added.