Posted on 10/08/2016 8:24:24 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Vigo County is kind of a big deal. The world wants to know what people here think.
That’s because, when it comes to picking the leader of the free world, as Vigo County goes so goes the nation. The community is known as “America’s bellwether,” or predictor. The county’s track record explains why.
A majority of Vigo County voters have favored the winning presidential candidate in every election since 1888, except two. None of the other 3,141 counties in the U.S. matches Vigo’s accuracy, according to Massachusetts political researcher Dave Leip’s “Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections.” In fact, a mere 35 votes cast in 1952 and another 462 ballots from 1908 separate Vigo County from total clairvoyance for the past 128 years.
“It’s a real curious statistic,” said Joe Etling, chairman of the Vigo County Democratic Party.
Leip began digging into voting records for counties coast to coast in the early 1990s. An MIT educated engineering manager for a semiconductor firm by day, he started his list of bellwether counties in 1997, gauging those that most reflected the national presidential voting from 1960 to ’96. Only eight counties, then, perfectly matched the nation, including Vigo.
“And since that time, every single one of [the other seven] has broken that streak, and sometimes dramatically,” Leip explained. “And then I looked at Vigo in more detail, and I said, ‘Wow. This is bigger.’” He labels the county’s mercurial voting record “very unusual” and “remarkable.”
Every four years, the county’s streak grows, and the outside interest grows with it. Already in 2016, journalists from media outlets such as the London Times, Reuters, NPR, BBC, CNN, Politico, MSNBC, Al Jazeera English and others have visited Terre Haute and the surrounding Vigo County. The Canadian Broadcasting Corp. and the Swedish newspaper, Expressen, are expected here later this month.
Most visiting reporters are covering the presidential race for their news organization, so they’ve been dispatched to lots of U.S. cities, small and large. Usually, they’re following a candidate to those towns. In Vigo County’s case, they’re coming here simply to meet residents and try to discern who locals want as their next president, a choice that has now boiled down to ex-reality TV star and real estate billionaire Donald Trump for the Republicans and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for the Democrats.
“It’s been, as Jerry Garcia once said, a long, strange trip,’” said London Times reporter Rhys Blakely, sitting in a downtown Terre Haute coffee shop last month.
The same can be said of the county’s voting history. Unlike other sectors of the nation which tend to be reliably Democratic or Republican, Vigo County’s preferences swing right to left like a pendulum. Locals shifted from Eisenhower to Kennedy and Johnson, back to Nixon, then to Carter, back to Reagan and Bush 41, over to Clinton, back to Bush 43, then to Obama. The reason for Vigo County’s unmatched flexibility remains a mystery.
“It’s the million dollar question, I guess,” Etling said.
Open-minded or just lucky?
Theories range from pure coincidence to the existence of multiple demographic groups in the local population that mirror the nation overall. The idealist view sees independence, open-mindedness and political diversity in Vigo County. “The way that we bend is a good thing. I think we’re willing to change,” said Carolyn Callecod, president of the League of Women Voters of Vigo County.
Thus, as the national mood shifts, it does so here, too, theoretically at least. “It’s a microcosm of the country,” said Randy Gentry, chairman of the county’s Republican Party. “You’ve got farms next to factories next to colleges. It’s socially liberal and fiscally conservative.” That mix, he added, “allows the community to swing back and forth.”
The county is an ideological outlier from much of Indiana. Since 1964, only one Democratic presidential candidate has carried the state; Barack Obama won Indiana by a slim 1 percent over Republican John McCain. By contrast, Vigo Countians gave Obama a 16 percentage-point victory that year, nearly twice the margin Obama won by nationally. Likewise, Democrats have generally dominated in races for county and city public offices.
Yet, conservative icon Ronald Reagan took Vigo County by 18 percent in 1984, an even wider margin than his national re-election win. In recent years, voters also elected Republicans to two high-profile local offices — mayor of Terre Haute and county prosecutor — to multiple terms, while filling the city and county councils with Democrat majorities.
Joe Anderson remembers well the political reversals, especially Reagan’s initial victory in 1980. “You’re speaking to the [Democratic] county chairman who had to live through that [stuff],” quipped the 77-year-old Anderson, an attorney and former judge who preceded Etling as the party’s leader.
“But I carried every local candidate” to victory, Anderson quickly added.
Big pool of independents
The deciding group of voters may be those who aren’t staunchly aligned to a party. That pool can be vast in Vigo County, at least according to voter turnout statistics. Typically, the May primaries attract the most partisan voters. Under Indiana law, primary participants must take either a Republican or Democratic ballot to help determine one party’s general election nominees. Such a single-party choice doesn’t seem to suit or interest lots of locals.
In 2012, a whopping 62 percent of Vigo Countians skipped the May primary but voted in that year’s November general election. Those wild-card voters totaled 24,956 in ‘12, helping President Obama win the county by less than a percentage point over Republican challenger Mitt Romney.
In addition to those wild-card voters, even some primary voters split their tickets between the parties in the fall. Because the Republican primary ballot often lacks contested races for county offices, GOP leaning voters often choose a busier Democratic ballot, which usually includes multiple candidates competing for the same seat. “But they vote Republican for national and often state races,” said Fred Nation, a Terre Haute native and former press secretary for U.S. senators Birch Bayh and Evan Bayh.
That crossover loosens voters’ partisan rigidity. “That makes them more willing to say, ‘Who should I vote for in this national race?’” Nation said.
So, Vigo may owe its rubbery bellwether streak to an extraordinarily large swath of independents; the presence of politically diverse groups such as labor unions, professors and students from the five local colleges, farmers, retail workers, business people and health care professionals; little change in the composition of the local population for more than a century; luck; or all of the above.
“The answer is somewhere in that whole mix,” Nation said.
Are signs a sign of future?
Which leads to the burning question of today — will Vigo County favor Trump or Clinton? No scientific polls have been conducted this fall in Vigo County, so the only harbingers of what’s ahead may be gut instincts, anecdotal evidence and local history.
In those 32 elections since 1888, a losing Republican presidential nominee has never carried this county. The only Oval Office losers to win here were a pair of well-spoken, liberal Democrats. Vigo voters chose William Jennings Bryan in 1908 over William Howard Taft, who won the presidency. Forty-four years later, locals picked Adlai Stevenson instead of president-to-be Dwight Eisenhower.
Gentry, the county’s Republican chairman, sees signs of a Trump victory here and nationwide, literally. Residents gobble up every yard sign he gets as soon as new supplies from the national campaign arrive in Terre Haute. “It’s like the ultimate poll for me, because I’ve never seen that kind of demand,” Gentry said.
Nation suspects the predominance of Trump yard signs may be misleading, though. “I see more Trump signs than Hillary signs, but signs can measure more zealotry,” Nation said. “I don’t think you can draw any conclusions from that.” Instead, he believes Clinton will win by a close margin.
Trump got more votes — 8,537 — than any candidate of either party in last May’s primary. Yet, 68 percent of Vigo primary voters, 18,361 in all, chose candidates other than Trump. And, 13,473 of them voted for the two Democrats, Clinton (who had 6,042) and Bernie Sanders (7,431). Will more of the Sanders supporters, non-Trump Republicans and primary-skippers join Clinton, the Donald or a third party candidate? Or will those wild-cards cast no vote for president?
The uncertainty creates the potential for Vigo to break with the rest of America in 2016.
“This could be year the streak is broken,” said Etling, the Democratic county chairman. “I’ll leave it to speculation of what that might mean.”
Great read. Thanks for posting it.
This reminds me of this story:
Put 256 mutual fund managers in a room. Have each flip a coin. Throw out the 128 that land tails.
Repeat seven times.
The one fund manager left? He’s a genius!
Election go by Vigo. Simple, easy mnemonic.
I liked him in the Vanishing Point remake.
Yards signs ? Really? There are millions of silent Trump supporters, like me who don’t have yard signs.
GO TRUMP!
Tttt
Tttt
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