We've Got The County Covered
We've Got The County Covered
By Cody McCracken
Over the next couple of weeks, the voters of Blaine County will cast their ballots for a long list of important offices and ballot measures. At the top of that ballot will be the candidates for President of the United States.
Some of you may think that your vote for this high office will not have much of an impact on the ultimate outcome. However, as Blaine County voters, we may have a greater impression on who wins the presidency than voters anywhere else. This is because Blaine County is the greatest predictor of presidential election winners in the history of our country.
Since Blaine County’s establishment in 1912, whichever presidential candidate won our county, ended up winning the presidency in 25 out of 27 elections.
The first of these two misses occurred in the county’s first election. In 1912 a plurality of Blaine County’s 1,171 total voters selected Theodore Roosevelt to return to the White House, yet Woodrow Wilson would ultimately claim victory. Then 76 years later, in the 1988 Presidential Election, by a margin of only 52 votes, we picked Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis to be President over then Vice President George H.W. Bush. An election Bush would ultimately win quite easily.
Those two are the only instances in which the prophetic Blaine County voter did not select the candidate that would end up winning the national election. In each of the 25 other elections in which Blaine County participated, we picked the winner.
In political parlance, this makes Blaine County the ultimate “bellwether” county, a term for counties whose results parallel the results of the national election. There are other notable bellwether counties across the nation, which have garnered much more focus from election analysts. Yet, none has as pristine a record of prediction success as our county. Clallum County Washington has received a lot of coverage for its propensity as a bellwether, correctly selecting the presidential winner in each election since 1980. While impressive, Clallum has only picked the right candidate in 29 of their 33 elections, a paltry 87.9% compared to our county’s 92.6% success rate. Blaine County is the king of election prognostication.
But this all raises the question, how and why has a county of under 7,000 people so effectively predicted the winner of our nation’s highest office?
These are complicated questions to resolve. Looking at metrics that usually indicate voting patterns (wealth, age, education, etc.) doesn’t give us an answer, Blaine County is either well above or below national averages.
However, one factor that may explain it is that, for a small rural county, Blaine County has quite a diverse population. The populations of Fort Belknap, Chinook, Harlem, South Blaine County, the Big Flat, are home to different types of people, with different priorities, backgrounds, beliefs, and differing voting preferences. All types of folks call Blaine County home, just like the nation as a whole.
This balanced array of points of view doesn’t fully explain it, but may be part of what makes Blaine County the penultimate bellwether. We are in this way a microcosm of the entire United States, a land with many types of people, from all walks of life, but who are all united by a common desire to make their communities a better place. Blaine County is a wonderfully unique place, with a unique superpower, picking the President of the United States.
So no matter who you vote for in this November's presidential election, do not take your vote for granted... because you will be picking the next President of the United States.
