the right to form their own regional compacts for sharing services. Politically speaking, Suffolk County supports the Democratic Party overwhelmingly. No Republican presidential candidate has won there since Calvin Coolidge in 1924. In 2012 Barack Obama received 77.4% of the vote, compared to 20.8% for former governor of Massachusetts Mitt Romney. In the 2014 gubernatorial election, Martha Coakley carried the county by a 32.4% margin, while losing the election statewide by 48.4 to 46.5%. In 2020, Joe Biden won the county by the largest margin of any presidential candidate since Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964, and was the first candidate since then to win more than 80% of the vote in the county. |} Law enforcement The Suffolk County Sheriff's Department's primary responsibility is oversight of the Nashua Street Jail and the South Bay House of Correction. These were built in the 1990s to replace the historic Charles Street Jail and Deer Island Prison, respectively. The Suffolk County Sheriff's Department was among those named in a 2020 WBUR report about the neglect of inmates with medical conditions in Massachusetts prisons leading to their deaths. Several notable figures in Massachusetts history were once the sheriff of Suffolk County: Joseph Hall (1818–1825) Charles Pinckney Sumner (1825–1839) John M. Clark (1855–1883) John A. Keliher (1917–1938) John F. Dowd (1938–1939) Frederick R. Sullivan (1939–1968) John W. Sears (1968–1969) Thomas S. Eisenstadt (1969–1977) Dennis J. Kearney (1977–1987) Robert Rufo (1987–1996) Andrea Cabral (2002–2013) Steven W. Tompkins (2013–present) Geography According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the county has a total area of , of which is land and (52%) is water. It is the second-smallest county in Massachusetts by land area and smallest by total area. Adjacent counties Essex County (north) Norfolk County (south) Middlesex County (west) Suffolk County has no land border with Plymouth County to its southeast, but the two counties share a water boundary in the middle of Massachusetts Bay. National protected areas Boston African American National Historic Site Boston Harbor Islands National Recreation Area (part) Boston National Historical Park Major highways Demographics Of the 292,767 households, 24.4% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 27.1% were married couples living together, 16.3% had a female householder with no husband present, 52.0% were non-families, and 36.3% of all households were made up of individuals. The average household size was 2.30 and the average family size was 3.11. The median age was