Yes Biden won. Five maps tell the story.

Many Republicans just can't believe Biden won the most votes.

They heard Trump claim he won by a landslide. They see the maps, and they look like a Trump landslide.  

Some of the correspondents to this blog watch Fox News and now drift to sampling Newsmax and One America Network. They find it hard to believe that anyone other than a few Socialists and Black activists, plus the weak-minded sheep who believe the corrupt liberal media, voted for Biden. They saw Biden as weak; his crowds were tiny; he is senile; he is an empty suit led around by AOC and Kamala Harris. 

Trump voters in the conservative media ecosystem were not surprised he did far better than polls predicted. That made sense. Biden's victory does not. Certified election results show Biden won by seven million votes, that he won 306 electoral votes, that he won five close battleground states. That cannot be true. There simply must have been fraud. Trump is adamant, and then there are maps circulating on social media that show Biden's win is impossible: 

It just seems wrong. How could Biden lose so much area and so many counties and still win? Just look at this map of counties for Trump:

Trump displayed a 2016 version of the map above in making he case four years ago that he won a landslide victory, not a narrow electoral vote victory. The NRA displayed the map with another message, saying that in an armed civil war, the red areas would overwhelm the blue ones. We have the guns and we have the territory, they said.

The two maps disguise two realities. One is that there are Trump and Biden voters mixed in everywhere. There are more Trump voters in California than there are in any other state. There were more Biden voters in Texas than in any state other than California. America is not as divided into red and blue as the map suggests.

The map disguises the other reality: Most Americans live in cities and the suburbs around them. Agriculture, forestry, mining, take place in wide open spaces with small populations. Here is a map of the night sky. It shows where people--voters and fellow Americans--live:

There is one anomaly visible in this map. There is a big cluster of bright lights in western North Dakota, almost directly north of the lights for Denver. Those lights don't signify people and voters. That is light from flaring off natural gas and methane from the oil drilling taking place in the Bakken oil fields. Aside from that, the dots of light generally represent where people are, a dark county with spots of light.

Here is a map that represents the actual votes for president with circle size representing vote size:

Now the map looks like a field of white--unpopulated areas between voters--dominated by big blue circles and smaller red circles, with a sharp line of demarcation just west of Houston, Dallas, Omaha and Kansas City, the 100th meridian. 

What is going on is commonplace understanding of voting patterns, combined with a realistic view of the population distribution of the country. Metropolitan areas voted for Biden, even in red states. Counties with big populations--and therefore big circles--tended to be blue, not red, although one can see red suburbs extending away from Dallas and red areas surrounding Atlanta when one gets far enough away from the city center. One sees red-by-a-whisker Pima County that includes the City of Phoenix, Arizona, and smaller blue Tucson south of it--a narrow victory for Biden.

Now the map tells a very different story: mixed America, with a blue majority.

One of the on-going themes within GOP circles is that the Constitution intentionally favored small states over large ones, and that cities would die without the countryside, and besides, based on the county map, most of "America" is Republican. Democrats respond with maps like the one above and one below. The next map shows where private enterprise creates wealth. The Fox News vision of cities is of homeless encampments, "Democrat" economic shutdowns for COVID,  and Antifa demonstrations. It is also where the good jobs are.

This wealth creation map above matches closely the Democratic vote for President. Democrats cite this as validation of Democratic legitimacy. We have a majority of the voters, we create a majority of the wealth, we are discriminated against in the electoral college but we win anyway--and should.

There is a warning embedded in the Economic Output map. Democratic vote for president--51.3%-- is associated the parts of the country that are doing relatively better; the wealth creators. It maps the continued erosion of the New Deal coalition that linked urban and rural working people and the then-Democratic Solid-South segregationists. Now the core archetype Democrat is an educated female office worker, plus Black and Hispanic voters who resent Republican racial tropes and dog whistles. The largest single demographic group in America is the White working class. Democrats used to win the countryside. Now they don't.

They are Trump's, and so are the Black and Hispanic voters who identify more strongly with being an American worker who wants a president who talks to them and their frustrations than they do being a person of color. There is an opportunity here for Democrats, but also a warning.