Counties Democrats and Republicans never won on any statewide level since 2016?

Question

A lot of people talk about blue counties and red states and counties. But I want to know how consistently blue or red different counties are. This is especially relevant given how different governor elections can deviate from partisanship dramatically given the right candidate (look at Massachusetts for example).

Since 2016, which counties have consistently gone blue or gone red in statewide races as of May 2022? In other words, which counties were always won by Democrats or Republicans at every level starting on November 8 2016?

Notes:

• We don't mean every single election. Just statewide elections where county results are available. For example, if a Democrat won a county office in a coal county in southern West Virginia, this doesn't count as a Democratic win but if Manchin won it in 2018, it would count as such and therefore void it from either party's no win list since Trump won every county in West Virginia in 2016. Statewide elections must be at large; winning a county in a House election doesn't count here. Statewide specials do count. For example if Doug Jones won a Trump +20 county in Alabama that every other Democrat lost, that county would be eliminated.
• I chose 2016 because it seems to be an inflection point in the rise of straight ticket voting in large part since 0 states split their vote and 2020 had even higher correlation in vote share for President and Senate despite one outlier in the outcome (Maine). There are likely 0 counties where one party has won every single statewide race in that county.

The reason I ask this is because I want to know which counties are the most loyal to both parties following a relatively recent year. I want this question updated after 2022 results are certified.

Answer 1

I think the scope of this question is simply too broad to be answered in Slack Exchange. There are 3,000+ counties in the United States and the vast majority fall under the umbrella you're asking for. It's just too time-consuming to list them all.

Let's use Texas as an example, simply because it's the state with the most counties. Below are the electoral maps for every major statewide race 2016-2020, courtesy of Wikipedia (the votes aren't final in the 2022 governor's race):

2016 Presidential race

2018 Senate race

2018 Gubernatorial race

2020 Senate race

2020 Presidential race

If you were scrolling fast, you'd be forgiven for thinking I just posted the same picture five times. If you scroll slowly and really take stock, you'll notice certain individual counties flip from red to blue or vice versa. But the vast, vast majority of counties don't change, at all.

This is not a quirk or Texas being a fairly reliably Republican state. The races above range from competitive (Cruz 2018, 3.63% margin of victory) to blowouts (Abbott 2018, 13.3%). But the difference is marginal on a map. Using that 2018 Senate race as an example, the final margin was 3.63%, yes. But only 13 counties had margins under 10%. Texas has 254 counties total, meaning about 95% of counties were strong R or strong D.

The problem here is that counties are designed based on roughly equal patches of area, compared to congressional districts, which shoot for roughly equal patches of population. As a result the United States has a few highly urban counties, A LOT of highly rural counties, and a handful of suburban counties. But Republicans have a near lock on rural voters, Democrats have a near lock on urban voters, which leaves pretty much only the suburban counties to swing on a regular basis. (And looking back at the Texas maps, those are the ones that swing; light red or light blue counties next to a dark blue that switch the other way)

So here's a map of all the counties in the U.S.:

And here's a map with the counties that flipped one way or the other in the 2020 presidential election:

That's a lot of white. A few of the white counties will flip occasionally in some other statewide race (and MA is a great example; Dem Liz Warren and Republican Charlie Baker both won every single county in 2018). But the vast majority of American counties just don't swing one way or the other, absent a complete sea change election (think FDR, the Southern realignment, Reagan 84, etc.), and we haven't really had one of those in the timeframe you're asking about.