While local Republican Party candidates enjoyed a bump in local media coverage for opening a new headquarters last summer, Democrats were facing vastly different circumstances. Texas likely isn't going Democratic, so we aren't including this in one of our 13 counties since it's less likely to decide the outcome of the presidential election. Third, it lists the fractionof bellwether counties each candidate won Obama at 18 of 19, Trump at 18 of 19 and Biden at one of 19. Instead, you can Find the latest updates on our Telegram channel which has more recent updates. Did they narrowly miss out on voting for the Democrat party in 2020? That includes 10 elections, including Obama in 2008 and Trump in 2016. These counties were geographically clustered in the Midwest and in the Northeast. We'll get an early indicator of Clinton's black support given this is a 7 p.m. poll close state and a place where 1-in-5 voters were black and went 93 percent for Obama. TIP: With demographic change in the Research Triangle area, though, it's possible for Clinton to win without this smaller county. Enter Donald Trump. So, even though they got it wrong in 2020, it is still worth figuring out how much they got it wrong by. Bellwether counties in swing states show that the demographic gulf between the Democrats' more urban coalition and the Republicans' base of rural and blue collar whites is poised to grow ever . Donald Trump is highly unlikely to win here -- Democrats have a big voter registration advantage in this county where Trump owns one of his many homes. The American Voter's Alliance provides a great national overview with many reports, videos and detailed legal submissions. This year with Mr Trump winning the county handily, not only did Vigo County Republicans keep their seats, a "red tide" similar to what transpired in Ottawa and Valencia counties saw Republican members take positions such as county judge, treasurer, clerk and recorder. Keep in mind that if we started the attrition from the 1980 election, there would still be 19 counties standing after the 2016 election. Affluent, well-educated Wake County, home to Raleigh and part of the Research Triangle, was once Republican territory. From 1980 to 2016, 19 counties voted for the winner of the presidential election every single time. As the country's demographics shift and the rural-urban divide becomes more pronounced, the chances appear slim. We relaxed the constraint by introducing the concept of a swing county, i.e. ), Fact check: Biden won the most total votes and the fewest total counties of any president-elect. Statewide results: 2012: Obama 53%-46% - 2008: Obama 56%-42%. Fifth, it listswhether each candidate's politicalparty won seats in the House of Representatives which occurred withObama andTrump, but not Biden. It almost became religious.". (It will at least show a trend away from the Republican party that would help make more sense of this situation. It's another one of those white, college-educated areas that could prove key to this election. In fact, a national coalition of election security officials described the general election as "the most secure in American history," per USA TODAY. Nineteen of these counties continued their streak in 2016 by voting for Trump, but the remaining 16 counties ended their bellwether streak by voting for Hillary Clinton. Some bored statistician or media hack needed something to do one day and decided to see which counties in the country consistently voted for the winning candidate. Below are 10 bellwether counties that could give signs as to how the electorate feels this cycle and in future races. A swing county is a county that voted correctly for the winning party at one election and then voted for the other winning party at the next election. Contributors wanted They are not a statistical curiosity, but the perfect distillation or embodiment of the whole countrys sentiment. But theres a blue collar contingent too who feel like theyre being ignored, according to county Democratic Chairman Marty Martinez. If you'd like to assist or contribute in some way, learn how. David Niven, a political scientist at the University of Cincinnati, also told the Associated Press that it "speaks to an evolution in American politics" rather than fraud. Bellwether counties are already extremely rare, but some bellwether counties are better than others at highlighting a change in sentiment. A bellwether county that includes Canton, its part of a heavily blue collar region where Trumps message could resonate. It voted twice for Bush and twice for Obama. From his tweet: From 1984 through 2016, spanning presidential elections, seventeen US counties in several states ad voted for the winning presidential candidate in an astounding 148 of 153 times including 100% five times for five different presidents: Advertisement - story continues below 1984 Reagan 1996 Clinton 2000 Bush 2012 Obama 2016 Trump The Most Important Counties to Watch on Election Night. Republicans Ulysses S. Grant and William Howard Taft won a majority of the presidential popular vote but lost a handful of seats in House, too. Watch this populous county, home to Manchester. Situated on the southern shore of Lake Erie in Ohio, Ottawa County is one of America's most accurate bellwether counties - a region where voters correctly pick the president, election after election for decades at a time. Three-in-four votes for President Obama in 2012 came from Clark County. What's the least amount of exercise we can get away with? Arapahoe County. Out of 3,141 counties, there were 22 counties that had successfully voted for the winning candidate in each and every election between 1988 and 2016 (included). Arizona (11 electoral votes) - Lean Republican. Trump, however, needs to drive up the score in Collin (Plano). Were not going to just give you the answer, since the significance of the result might be lost on you. Utah (6 electoral votes) - Likely Republican. What are the odds of getting 21 heads or 21 tails? Watch the Philadelphia suburbs, and that means white women. "When I came here in 1989, you couldn't be elected dog catcher if you weren't a Democrat," he says. There are 391 such counties. In 2020, a single. Go on, look them up! "It gave suburban moderates an opportunity to vent their anger at Trump directly at the top of the ticket but continue to vote for the down-ballot Republicans they liked," he said. Statewide results: 2012: Obama 54%-45% - 2008: Obama 57%-41%. Or want to contribute to our open-source collection of articles and statistics? In politics, the term often applies in a metaphorical sense to characterize a geographic region where political tendencies match in microcosm those of a wider area, such that the result of an election in the former region might predict the eventual result in the latter. So those suburban whites are key here and might tell a story not just about who wins the state, but who wins nationally. And notably, the 16 counties that lost their bellwether status in 2016 are more racially diverse (median of 46 percent non-Hispanic white, compared to 89 percent) and more highly educated (median of 27 percent of adults 25 or older with a bachelors degree or higher, compared to 22 percent) than the 19 counties that maintained their bellwether status. Latest voter registration totals: Unaffiliated: 49,026Democrats: 40,563Republicans: 35,146. hide caption. Mike Pence, could marshal his supporters to cross the border and provide support. In fact, of the 19 pivot counties across America to correctly pick the president every time over the past 10 election cycles, only one - Clallam County in Washington state - saw a majority back Joe Biden for president. Virginia (13 electoral votes) - Lean Democratic. Relatively few counties across the nation switched party support in 2012, but Rockingham was one of them, flipping from Obama in 2008 to Romney. Most of the statistics in the meme are true but they are not proof of voter fraud or other supposed issues with the election. But there was only one county Clallam, Washington which voted Democrat. Statewide results: 2012: Obama 52%-46% - 2008: Obama 55%-43%. It's happened before. (See the DPV 08 column in the image below.) A switch county is our name for a county that happens to vote for the winning party whenever there is a change of parties, ignoring how they voted for the incumbent. Outstanding. There are numerous theories about why it happened in 2020. Fact check: What's true and what's false about the 2020 election, Joe Biden says democracy 'proved to be resilient' after Hawaii casts final ballots in Electoral College, Election security officials: 'No evidence voting systems compromised', Disputing Trump, Barr says no widespread election fraud, How Biden managed to win far more votes in 2020 than Obama did in 2008 but far fewer counties. And this is the state with the highest share of whites with college degrees in the country. Wood County is a decent bellwether of the state: Mr. Trump carried it by eight points in 2016, matching his statewide margin. If the Republican percentage in 2020 is less than in 2016, it would clearly indicate a change in sentiment away from the Republican party, towards the Democrat party. These counties turned out to vote strongly for the Democrat party in 2008, so they are the most likely to swing back to the Democrat party in 2020. Maricopa (home to Phoenix) is the most populous county in the state by far 60 percent of voters live here. Other counties to watch: Also watch Luzerne (Wilkes-Barre). Until this year. Ultimately, of course, Trumps strong performance in these counties didnt matter because of Bidens gains in the more highly educated suburbs of Milwaukee, Grand Rapids and Philadelphia. The Atlantic wonders why we're still arguing about masks. Lets find a coin, and flip it. Will Democrats Rally Behind President Biden In 2024? That report was issued on Nov. 12. None of them impacts the legitimacy of the presidential election. George W. Bush twice won comfortably in Forsyth County, the home of Winston-Salem. What does Terre Haute know about America 2016? Latest voter registration totals: 618,420 No party registration. (You can make up your own mind on what the trends mean.). our Gitlab account where you can The highest percentage being 66.1%. On a cold, wind-swept November afternoon two weeks after election day, the crowds that thronged the beaches of Ottawa County all summer long are but a distant memory. Website Updates Paused 2020 Election (1210) This one of 99 counties made up 16 percent of Obama's total vote in 2012. But it's also not unprecedented. To make things more interesting we will only look at swing counties since the 2004 election. Do you know this baby? But when word got out, Trump supporters crashed it. Some of the same messages that are going to work in Northeastern Ohio are maybe not going to work as well down here, said county GOP Chairman Alex Triantafilou. Free and open-source. The same can be said for the three states listed in the meme. Team up with others in your region, and help out by Also key is Larimer (Fort Collins). Found an error on our site? Since 1960, Democrats have won Rockingham County only three times. a suburban Philadelphia county that went for Hillary Clinton in 2016 with 52.6% of the vote, and that . After 8 elections, the number of counties left standing defy the odds, and it is this fact that makes them bellwether counties. Other counties to watch: Perhaps no state more starkly displays the broader rural-urban divide in this country than Virginia. In other words, we are including more counties that are more likely to vote for the Democrat party. This fact check is available at IFCNs 2020 US Elections FactChat #Chatbot on WhatsApp. When sorted from the highest to lowest Democrat percentage vote (at the 2008 election), we can see that there is 1 county that has a percentage Democrat vote greater than 60% at the 2008 election. It's true that both Obama in 2008 and Trump in 2020 won in Florida, Ohio and Iowa. The 13 Bellwether Counties That Could Decide The Election. Statewide results: 2012: Romney 53%-46% - 2008: McCain 52%-47%. "Biden did well in virtually all of the most populous counties in the U.S., which, along with a larger electorate explains why he defeated Donald Trump by over 7 million votes, despite carrying many fewer counties," Smith wrote. Until this year. It's true that the report first showed Biden at 477 counties andTrump at 2,497 counties, though ithas since been updated to showBiden at 509 andTrump at 2,547. She blames much of that on the "Trump effect" - Mr Trump's ability to engage people in politics by appealing to their fears and discontents. Just one Clallam County, Washington voted for President Joe Biden. That might mean needing to factor that in by a couple points. Home to Davenport, the states third-largest city, Scott County is also packed with independents who can swing either way. Statewide results: 2012: Romney 57%-41% - 2008: McCain 55%-44%. Statewide results: 2012: Romney 51%-49% - 2008: Obama 50%-49%. Suburban Denvers Arapahoe and Jefferson counties have moved in tandem for the past four elections. In the 1990s, he says, Democrats ran for many local county positions unopposed. Want to dive deeper? Almost a quarter of Obama's votes in 2012 came out of Wayne County (Detroit), which is 41 percent black. You have probably noticed by now that with each new section we write, we are relaxing the constraints to make it easier to build a case for the Democrats winning the 2020 election. This website merely reports on substantial allegations made by well-known public figures, elected officials, members of congress, and their legal teams, and will correct errors when notified. It went with the exact margin for Romney in 2012 statewide and McCain statewide in 2008. According to PolitiFact, voter turnout was66.2% in 2020 and 61.6% in 2008. He would have to really drive up big margins in the less populous counties in the mountainous Western part of the state, as well as Chesterfield (south of Richmond) and Virginia Beach. In 2008, Obama received69,498,516 votes, per the Federal Election Commission. Latest voter registration totals:Democrats: 369,734Republicans: 247,029No Party Affiliation: 218,642Others: 30,414. The fact that there are fewer swing counties means that there are fewer potential bellwether counties. Dave Wasserman, who analyzes election data for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, told the Wall Street Journal that ticket-splitting appeared to make "a fashion comeback in many places.". All other 21 counties voted Republican. In this section we will introduce a new concept: The swing county. After you have spent an hour trying, record the maximum streak length you achieved. Obeng (2016) was similarly skeptical, noting that bellwethers run the risk of producing models that explain what has happened but cannot predict the future. "These counties, they're not real representations of America," says Mr Kreisberg of BlueLabs Analytics. We tried to pick counties that had a large enough population to matter some or if they just had a knack for picking that statewide winner. The most impressive of those was Valencia County, New Mexico, which voted for the victor in. But that's no longer the case. who in 2016 won Caswell and other rural counties in North Carolina by tapping those feelings of abandonment. Latest voter registration totals:Democrats: 316,586Republicans: 258,725No Party Affiliation: 206,457Others: 22,695. Four years later, Caswell is still looking for a second act for its . Other counties to watch: Denver suburbs Adams, Arapahoe, Jefferson. there are signs that the progress he made there in 2016 winning the county by about 1.5 percentage points after Obama carried it by 16 points . Trump is making a hard play here; His first visit to Iowa after accepting the nomination at the Republican National Convention was in Scott County. That means, watch Bucks and Northampton counties. It provided the second highest vote totals of any county and a significant share for Democrats. From 1980 to 2016, 19 counties voted for the winner of the presidential election every single time. Split-Ticket Voters Helped Biden, Republicans in Nebraska, Maine, Your California Privacy Rights/Privacy Policy. Experts say that while traditional bellwether counties are whiter and less educated than the national average, there's no one element that unites them as political oracles. Explore the pages of this site and the links to further reports. Re-doing the analysis we obtain 35 modern bellwether counties after the 2016 election. Based on our research, the claim that these five statistics about Obama, Trump and Biden appear to discredit election results is MISSING CONTEXT. The idea being these counties are good at sensing a change of sentiment and will happily vote for whichever party makes the most sense to them. First, itliststotal number of votes they received Obama at 69,000,000,Trump at 74,000,000 and Biden at 81,000,000. The trick, for Trump, is to hold down her winning percentage here in a county that has nearly a quarter of a million registered Republicans. Or even better, if you have children, get them to do it for you. Combinedwith general population growth, and this election had 27 million more participants. Here are the counties that consistently voted more than 50% for the winning party since the 2000 election: To make things a little more interesting we will relax the constraints a little to include modern bellwether counties, that is, counties that have voted for the winning candidate since 1992. Other counties to watch: Remarkably, Obama won every county in this state in 2008. The county also features a diverse array of industries, from dairy farms and small manufacturers to major health-care companies. One of the highest income counties in the nation and a longtime GOP Midwestern stronghold, in recent years the suburban behemoth has begun trending toward Democrats -- not even Mitt Romney, who grew up here, could win it. Those places will get the bulk of the presidential candidates time and their surrounding media markets will get the bulk of the television ad spending. [Even Though Biden Won, Republicans Enjoyed The Largest Electoral College Edge In 70 Years. It went in a big way for Trump in the primary, but Obama won it, and the margin was similar to his statewide spread. Dont simply gloss over this. A total of 35 counties voted for the winner of each presidential election from 1980 through 2012. But its population has steadily diversified, including a surge in Asian and Latino voters, which has made it more competitive Obama carried it twice. North Carolina (15 electoral votes) - Toss-up. View our How You Can Help page, or contribute via But after twice voting for George W. Bush, it has since moved well to the left. But its not just demographic trends driving the loss of bellwether status. More than one-in-four votes cast for Obama and Romney in 2012 came from Hillsborough. Driving up the margins in those places will be key for Clinton. Trump needs to drive up the score in Cobb, which provided more votes than any other county for Mitt Romney in 2012. This is a fairly small county, but we couldn't resist the toll of this bellwether. Hillary Clinton speaks during a rally at the Abraham Lincoln High School on Jan. 31 in Des Moines, Iowa. @ryanmatsumoto1, Donald Trump (1624 posts) Just how big is it? Now, Democrats have to drive up the margin in this populous, central North Carolina county. "End of day, the solution is complicated but the problem is very simple," wrote a user who shared the meme on Instagram. GOP Chairman Dale Fellows noted that the population has been steadily aging in recent years. America's most accurate bellwether counties, regions that have a reputation for accurately picking the president, got the presidential election completely wrong. (The highest value being 66.1%), When sorted from the highest to lowest Democrat percentage vote (at the 2008 election), we can see that there are 25 counties that have a percentage Democrat vote greater than 60% at the 2008 election. In total, Trump won 18 of the 19 former bellwether counties, winning the average such county by 13.7 points in 2020. Has No Presidential Candidate Won Iowa, Florida and Ohio and Still Lost? The most populous county in the state and home to Manchester and Nashua, Hillsborough twice voted narrowly for Bush and twice for Obama. Trump gave them hope. The odds of 21 counties out of 22 missing the mark is extremely remote! Pittsburghs Allegheny County, the second-most populous county in the state after Philadelphia, is heavily Democratic. With a total turnout of 78%, Donald Trump won Ottawa County by a margin of 61% to 38%, improving his 2016 return by four points. 2016 primary winners: Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, Latest voter registration totals: Democrats: 230,401Republicans: 211,817No Party Affiliation: 102,635Others: 16,526. PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY EMILY SCHERER / GETTY IMAGES. All Rights Reserved. Trump also needs to overperform in Macomb, another Detroit suburb, which narrowly went for Obama in 2012. Furthermore, consider the fact that bellwethers dont just have a random 50% chance at winning we should expect them to have a better than 50% chance of getting it right. These are places that are demographically strong for Republicans in the abstract, but might have had something that kept them closer to 50-50.". Increased political polarization is another reason why fewer counties are consistently indicative of presidential results in recent years. For instance, Washington County, Maine the median bellwether county in terms of its share thats non-Hispanic white is 89 percent non-Hispanic white, which is much higher than the overall U.S. population that identifies as such (60 percent). The storied home of Reagan Democrats and the third most-populous county in the state, southeastern Michigans Macomb last went Republican at the presidential level in 2004. Latest voter registration totals: 216,082No party registration. Whether or not these less diverse, industry-dependent communities can regain their bellwether status in four years' time remains to be seen. In communities . Asingle county could have as few as 88 residents,like Kalawao County, Hawaii. Obama won Monroe County 49.6-49.1 in 2012 and 52-47 in 2008. How many of these counties voted less for the Republican party in 2020? Just a tiny fraction of them truly matter. The table shows the number of counties that voted for the winning candidate since the 1988 election. Or, if you dont have enough time, how many of the top 10 switch counties, which overwhelmingly voted Democrat in 2008 (with a percentage Democrat vote over 58% ! Trump won 18 of the 19. Other counties to watch: Nowhere is more important than Polk (Des Moines).