Rhode Island 2020 presidential election in review: Kent County
To see the first post in this series, which explains the background on the overall project, see here.
The new swing-iest county in Rhode Island is the focus of today’s post. Kent County famously (infamously?) became, in 2016, the first RI county to vote for a Republican presidential candidate since Ronald Reagan in 1984. With Joe Biden winning it back in the 2020 election, it joined a peculiar group of 25 counties around the nation (colored in dark green below) won by Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, Donald Trump in 2016, and Biden in 2020.
As you can see from the map above, there are a fair number of these counties in New England and the greater northeast, as well as the upper midwest and plains. These so-called “Boomerang Pivot Counties” are majority white, exurban to rural counties, a demographic that is becoming increasingly problematic for Democrats. Obviously, while Biden won them back, the areas in dark green will continue to be contested ground with a long term Republican tilt.
We’re speaking generally here, so how true is this for Kent County?
Well, as you can see from the graphic, (h/t JHK forecasts), there was a gradual drift to the right over several elections, culminating in Trump’s narrow win in 2016. It has trended directionally with the state as a whole since 2000, but was a few points to the right of the state from 2000–12, before Trump pushed it further right in 2016. It is notable that while Biden flipped it back in 2020, the gap between Kent and the state as a whole was still roughly 15 points, same as in 2016. If this gap remains or grows, Kent will be established as the best county for Republicans in statewide elections going forward.
Kent County is simple geographically and made up of 5 municipalities — Warwick, Coventry, East Greenwich, West Warwick and West Greenwich. Starting with the largest city first, Warwick was similar to suburban counties covered in the write-up on Providence County, where support for Trump fell off a cliff in 2020. While narrowly winning 10 precincts in 2016, in 2020 Trump surrendered all of them to Biden and didn’t improve in a single precinct across a very large city (for Rhode Island).
As you can see below, the areas of Warwick that Biden flipped were concentrated on the coast of Narragansett Bay and Greenwich Bay. This section of Warwick and the uber-wealthy Watch Hill area of Westerly (Biden flipped this back too) were the only coastal areas of the state to be won by Donald Trump in either 2016 or 2020. As coastal areas go in Rhode Island and elsewhere, these areas overlap very tightly with the wealthiest neighborhoods in the city, suggesting a possible “country club Republican” voter that held their nose for Trump in 2016 but ditched him for 2020. More on those later.
At 35,000 residents, Coventry was twice the largest municipality in Rhode Island to vote for Donald Trump. Like many of the rural areas of Providence County, Biden made some gains, improving over Clinton in 16 of 19 precincts, but most were single digit improvements that couldn’t bring the town back into the Democratic column. Biden, like Clinton, won just one precinct in the town — the 14th on the southern border with West Greenwich. For now, Coventry looks to be a decent base of GOP support in Kent County. Interestingly enough, in a sign of the senior Senator’s wide appeal, Senator Jack Reed won Coventry in 2020, which neither Clinton, Biden, nor Reed’s junior colleague Senator Sheldon Whitehouse could do.
West Warwick, along with the town of Exeter, were the only towns to flip from Trump to Biden in 2020. Like Woonsocket, it had fallen far fast for Democrats here, as Barack Obama won by 23 points over Mitt Romney in 2012, making for a 24-point swing to the right in 2016. Biden made gains in every part of this small, largely struggling city. There are parts of West Warwick that meet federal qualifications as being seriously economically distressed, on par with the lowest-income neighborhoods of the urban core.
Finally, we come to East Greenwich, once the bastion of New England country club Republicanism in Rhode Island that now votes up and down the ballot for Democrats. There are wealthy, highly-educated areas like EG across the country that epitomized the sort of elite Republicanism that was left in tatters by the MAGA movement. Although the town went narrowly for Barack Obama twice, it still voted reliably to the right of the state on down ballot elections and anchored the vote-sink turned dummy-mander monstrosity that is Senate District 35.
EG saw the biggest swing toward Biden in all of Kent County, at +12. Biden did not win a precinct there by less than 20, surely becoming the first Democrat to hit 60% here in decades. It would likely take a stunning ideological orientation at the national level for EG to become reliably Republican once again.
Here are some other fast facts on Kent County presidential election results:
- Biggest Swing Right (2016–2020): Coventry precinct 606 (R+4)
- Biggest Swing Left (2016–2020): Warwick precinct 3530 (Cowesett Area) D+17
- Best Trump precinct: Coventry precinct 620 (Trump +36)
- Best Biden precinct: Warwick precinct 3504 (Pawtuxet Village) Biden +40
- Most total votes: West Warwick precinct 3804 (2463 votes)
- Most Biden votes: Warwick precinct 3501(Gaspee Point) 1323 votes
- Most Trump votes: West Warwick precinct 3804 (1126 votes)
