The nation's last true bellwether county has lost its status—after picking the wrong presidential election candidate for the first time in almost half a century.
Going into Tuesday's election, Clallam County, with its population of 78,000, in northwest Washington, had the longest track record in the nation of correctly picking the winner.
It had been correct for 11 straight elections, ever since Ronald Reagan defeated incumbent Democratic president Jimmy Carter by a landslide in 1980.
But its win streak came to an end this year, when voters chose Vice President Kamala Harris by a margin of more than eight points—only to find her Republican opponent Donald Trump was declared the winner early on Wednesday morning.
According to the Clallam County's unofficial results from Tuesday's election, Harris secured about 52.9 percent of the vote, while Trump got 44.4 percent.
Some 22,042 ballots were cast for Harris, while 18,504 went to Trump, out of a total of 41,943 total ballots.
That did not reflect the outcome nationally—forecasts predicted Trump had secured wins in enough battleground states to surpass the needed 270 Electoral College votes and win the presidency by early Wednesday morning.
Though votes are still being counted in some states, Trump is also leading the popular vote. As of 2:45 p.m. ET on Friday afternoon, he is ahead by more than 4.3 million votes nationally.
Marc Abshire, director of the Port Angeles Chamber of Commerce and a Harris supporter, told the Los Angeles Times that he was proud that Clallam County had backed the Democratic ticket this year.
"But also disappointed we're losing our bellwether status because of it," he told the newspaper. "Out here, we just didn't have the grievance vote that most of the rest of the country seemed to have."
Clallam County has only backed the losing candidate three times in the past 100 years: in 1968, when voters favored Democrat Hubert Humphrey over triumphant Richard Nixon, in 1976 when voters chose Republican Gerald Ford, over winner Carter and in 2024.
But the county has trended blue in recent local, state and federal elections, as Northwest Public Broadcasting noted recently.
Though the county had backed the winning candidate in every contest between 1980 and 2020—Republicans have won six times and Democrats five times—the outcome in recent elections has been decided by slim margins.
President Joe Biden won the county by about 3 percentage points in 2020, and Trump won the county by a similar margin in 2016. In 2012, former President Barack Obama won by a margin of about 0.4 percentage points.
English (US) ·