They caused this, they brought it on because they dont like him, Fannin said. I dont feel good about the leadership in our country right now.. Richard Zulch, an Army veteran who served in Vietnam as a combat engineer from 1969 through 1971 and is the quartermaster for Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 4811 in Bowling Green, said he has been able to see the political landscape from both sides of the fence. John Hawker, a 74-year-old Port Clinton resident who grew up in Toledo, was sitting at the end of the bar and also weighed in on the state of affairs. It doesnt matter whether you are a Republican or a Democrat, youre going to get a crook. They write that the electoral record shows that not only are bellwether counties poor predictors of who will win a presidential election, rising polarization means that their ability to predict long streaks of elections has been in decline over the last two decades. Longtime Bowling Green resident Doug Miller, a conservative and Donald Trump supporter who works as a chief operating officer for a heavy-duty trucking company in nearby Fremont, said the company, which was heavily affected during the pandemic, is still navigating challenges. TERRE HAUTE, Ind.For well over a century, voters in Vigo County, Indiana, have backed the winner in almost every presidential election. I think everyone has the same opinion that things arent good.. What Should Fiscal and Social Policy in a Sustainable Economy Look Like? The morale of the people up there is bad. Epoch Times, Gateway Pundit, and EveryLegalVote.com show a different electoral vote count for two reasons: They exclude states with pending litigation or recounts, subtracting votes from. An Emerson poll conducted shortly before Election Day was completely off, showing Trump and Biden neck-to-neck. Thus it would appear that bellwether. Michael Sakal is a former reporter for The Epoch Times. For Brendon, another resident of Riley who declined to disclose his last name, his spiritual belief will lead him not to vote at all this year. Its kind of like used-car salesmen: if their lips are moving, theyre probably lying.. Haotian Chen is a Ph.D. student in political science at the University of California, Irvine. In 2016, Pennsylvania itself was wrenched out of its 24-year run as a Democratic sure bet when Donald Trump cleared just over 44,000 more votes than Hillary Clinton and took the states prized 20 electoral votes. Copyright 2000 - 2023 The Epoch Times Association Inc. All Rights Reserved. I mean the whole world ought to be mad at China, we should all be going to war against them. There isnt anything I can do to change it or to make it better by voting.. And then theres Vigo Countyin Indianathe quintessential bellwether that has correctly picked the winner in all but two elections since 1888. He has since assessed each candidate on their moral stances, he said, rather than by party affiliation. Its horrible. In 2020, amid widespread accusations of Democrat cheating, these bellwethers were not even close checking in at a mind-blowing 6%! On . There is nothing we can do about it; the power is out of our hands.. He predicts that many Trump voters will start to waver in the weeks leading up to the election and will end up not voting. In the May 3 primary, theres also a mix of familiar names with new candidates on the ballot. In new research, Bernard Grofman and Haotian Chen argue that the evidence shows that this claim is laughable. Many of its residents include farmers, retirees who love to fish, and more than 3,300 military veterans. Median household incomes range from $65,000 in Bremer County, Iowa, to $32,000 in Hidalgo County, New Mexico. . Those who believe that Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election have held up his victories in many bellwether counties as evidence of electoral fraud. Rarely are we really stuck with people in leadership that are fairly moderate. Nothing has changed regarding the date of the May 3 primary election, Baumgardner said. They missed in 1908 and 1952, but otherwise, the county has well earned its reputation as a bellwether. Former President Trump and his supporters continue to loudly assert that he really won the 2020 election even though all the alleged direct evidence of fraud has not passed the sniff test of local courts, including those with Republican judges. He said he finds it hard to believe Bidens claim that he never talked to his son Hunter Biden about his deals in Ukraine and China. Its just not that great, Paul said. Enforce the ones that you do have, he said. The counties tend to be clustered in the Midwest and the Northeast, with only four of the counties not falling into one of those regions, they said. Its a county where the residents are proud of its powdered metal factories and where the Ford F-Series is as ubiquitous as the American flag. Shepherd said being able to bear arms is of particular importance now and she fears Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden would restrict that right. It could be said that Ottawa County is one of the top bellwether counties in Ohio, if not the country. The majority of rural America are our hard-working, blue-collar workers. They take pride in going to work, owning their home, having that simple life. Whats happening is affecting everybody, he said. As a father, I would be curious about what my kids are doing.. 0:00 0:00. Your email address will not be published. Since the 2020 elections, there also have been 879 newly-registered voters bringing the total to 30,248, Board of Elections director Carol Ann Hill told The Epoch Times. She can be reached at cara.ding@epochtimes.com, Biden Extends National Emergency Due to Extraordinary Threat of Russian Actions in Ukraine, Suburban Wisconsin Voters Divided on Presidential Race. However, the political viewpoints of its residents are mixed as they have become more wary and leery of the government. Figure 1 Counties expected to have unbroken or near unbroken string of correct matches with national election outcome if each county has a 50 percent chance of voting for the winner. We use cookies to understand how you use our site and to improve your experience. That streak ended in 2020 when voters cast the highest percentage of ballots for Republican Donald Trump14,628 (60.83 percent) to Democrat Joe Bidens 9,008 (37.46 percent). Sawyer County, Wisconsin, and Clallam County, Washington, have substantial Native American populations, the authors said. We have to figure out a way to control fuel prices. Its education level is a little lower25 percent have a bachelors degree or higher, compared to, nationally. Biden has talked both ways, so its hard for me to really grasp where he is on the issue. Moreover, once we allow for bellwethers to have less than perfect records of success, the expected numbers of bellwethers increases much more rapidly than most (including us) would expect. He voted for Trump in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections and said hed vote for him again if he were the Republican nominee. Teresa Shepherd, a middle-aged woman living in Riley, just southeast of Terre Haute, has never cared much about voting. Both Hidalgo and Valencia County, New Mexico, are close to 60 percent Hispanic. By continuing to use our site, you accept our use of cookies, revised Privacy Policy and Terms of Use. Supreme Court nominees also matter a lot to Myers in this election. They also found that high scoring counties do exhibit a geographic trend. Our mission is to put on honest elections.. For example, if we call a county a bellwether if it has one less correct match than the number of elections in a sequence, we will get nearly 19 bellwethers even in a set of eleven elections, and in a set of seven elections, we will see 197 bellwethers far more than the 27 we would find under our assumptions when we require a bellwether to have an unblemished record of predictive success. We need to finish putting up the wall that Trump started. The issues most important to Jacobs are immigration, the health care system, and socialism. The researchers also mapped all American counties (over 3,000) by their bellwether scorethat is their record of voting for the overall winner in each of the previous 10 presidential electionsgiving progressively larger weight to more recent elections. There are 22 counties in the US that managed to vote for the winning party in every single election from 1988 to 2016. 2020: Trump - 54.12%, Biden - 45.20%. The state as a whole is going more Republican, Wood County Board of Elections Director Julie Baumgardner told The Epoch Times. We live in an evenly divided nation, and the past five presidential elections demonstrate that well with their extremely close outcomes, Bergbower, an associate professor at Indiana State University, said in an email to The Epoch Times. Thats about 43 percent of the eligible voters in the country, according to a study of nonvoters overseen by professors at Tufts University and Stony Brook University. This year, Vigo went for Trump by nearly 15 points, roughly the same as in 2016. Titchner, a Vietnam veteran, has been painting houses for 45 years and said he votes based on the candidate, rather than the party. County residents had voted for the presidential candidate who won the White House for nearly 60 years, since Democrat Lyndon Johnson won in 1964, according to the Ottawa County Board of Elections. There is another bellwether list of 58 counties that has correctly picked each president since 2000; Trump won 51 of them by an average margin of nearly 15 points. I trust the system implicitly, he said. The legislature of Orange County, New York, unanimously passed a revised spending plan of close to $75 million in federal COVID-19 . Its crazy. By Cara Ding. And the thing is, when they have these laws now that they arent enforcing, what good is another law going to be? In 2020 the expansion also began generating $898,000 a year for the next 15 years for Lake Local Schools. Bernard Grofman is Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Jack W. Peltason Chair of Democracy Studies at the University of California, Irvine. In particular, recent research which identified nineteen bellwether counties found that they "tended to be whiter, older, less educated, have lower median incomes, have a lower percentage of workers in the labor force, and have higher rates of vacant housing than the country as a whole." Things have been bad for so long, they dont care.. RIDGWAY, Pa.Tucked into a wooded valley in north-central Pennsylvania is the bellwether borough of Ridgway, the county seat of Elk County. The Epoch Times spoke with some voters in Terre Haute and surrounding towns on Oct. 20 to get a glimpse of the bellwether mood ahead of the presidential election. Like all-or nothing bellwethers, counties that closely tracked the election for 12 consecutive elections failed to continue that form for a 13th time. Only one, Clallam County in Washington, went for former Vice President Joe Biden and only by about a three-point margin. The shift is evident when comparing current registrations with the 2016 numbers. Our politicians need to look on both sides of the fence and work together. Jim was awarded the Reed Irvine Accuracy in . I just got on Social Security disability, because I cant work anymore. Vigo County voters supported Trump by a 15 percent margin in 2016. The roads are bad, the price of gas is high, its one thing after another. Given the global context of Russias invasion of Ukraine, they believe higher gas prices and inflation is coming, and theyre not happy about it.