Former President Donald Trump made inroads in quite a few DC neighborhoods during the 2020 election, many of them east of the Anacostia River. The trend of greater support for Trump among Black and Hispanic voters was telegraphed by polls before the November 2020 election and appears to manifest in a very detailed interactive map of election results published by the New York Times. Among the areas where Trump made the most gains from 2016: River Terrace, Barry Farm, and, notably, Navy Yard, which Politico reported in 2018 had become favored among younger Trump administration staffers for offering young Trumptowners a place “where they can feel far away from the District’s locals and the rest of its political class.”
Now, we’re talking about DC, where Joe Biden absolutely dominated the local vote (he won 92 percent), so in most places Trump’s gains are something of a tallest-leprechaun contest, especially when you look at numbers from the DC Board of Elections (you can peruse those in this spreadsheet.) Trump doubled his share of votes in Barry Farm, for instance, which brought him to about 4 percent of votes in precinct 119—70 votes for the Republican ticket and 1,519 for the Democrats.
The ex-President tripled his share of votes in precinct 125, which includes part of the Washington Highlands neighborhood, from 1 percent in 2016 to a touch more than 3 percent in 2020, which equated to 104 votes for Trump-Pence and 2,901 for Biden-Harris. Trump’s best precinct, percentage-wise, was precinct 9, which includes Spring Valley and was also his best DC precinct in 2016. Then, he got about 15 percent of the vote; this past November he got around 18 percent there. (Numbers-wise, that meant 291 votes for the Republican ticket and 1,256 for the Democrats.) He also saw modest gains in precincts that include parts of neighborhoods such as Woodley Park, Mount Pleasant, and Columbia Heights.
Navy Yard had the biggest swing toward Trump: about an 8 percent change from 2016. Still, that equated to 820 votes for Trump-Pence and 4,778 for Biden Harris. So it’s an interesting trend (as people on Reddit have noticed, there’s a surprising amount of pink—which indicates swings toward Trump—on the Times‘s map), but DC is extremely unlikely to become a “toss-up” jurisdiction.
Andrew Beaujon joined Washingtonian in late 2014. He was previously with the Poynter Institute, TBD.com, and Washington City Paper. He lives in Del Ray.
