And then there were two.
Trivia question: What U.S. counties have voted for the winning presidential candidate every election this century?
Since 2000, what counties have voted in favor of the winning presidential candidate every time?
In 2000, 2,439 counties voted for Republican George W. Bush. And four years later, almost all of them, 2,372, voted for him again. (We are not counting here the places that voted for Democrat Al Gore in 2000 because they were already eliminated from voting for the winner every time.)
The party flip in 2008 to Democrat Barack Obama dramatically reduced the number of counties that had always picked the winner. Only 272 counties voted twice for Bush and then for Obama. And his reelection in 2012 cut that number even further: 129 counties voted Bush, Bush, Obama, Obama – or R-R-D-D.
Republican President Donald Trump’s 2016 election cut the number of “bellwether” perfect-record counties to 58, and the quick switch back to Democrat Joe Biden in 2024 reduced the counties picking the winner every time to a handful, just nine counties. They were Kent, Delaware; Clay, Minnesota; Blaine, Montana; Hillsborough, New Hampshire; Essex, New York; Saratoga, New York; Chesapeake, Virginia; Clallam, Washington and Door, Wisconsin.
From those nine that had voted Bush, Bush, Obama, Obama, Trump and then Biden, which picked Trump again in 2024?
The much easier question is how many counties just always vote the same way. Since 2000, 2,067 counties – two-thirds of the nation’s 3,125 counties – have voted Republican every time: Bush, Bush, McCain, Romney, Trump, Trump, Trump. An additional 318 have voted Democratic every time: Gore, Kerry, Obama, Obama, Clinton, Biden, Harris. As a note, we are not including Alaska, which doesn’t have counties, and the boroughs in their place are not how election results have consistently been reported. Also, a handful of other counties have gone away, and we merged their results.
The vast majority of counties always vote the same way. The handful of bellwethers are extremely rare places that are narrowly balanced. At that point, it’s pretty much a coin flip on who will win there each time. So picking seven winners is like flipping heads on a coin seven times in a row – that’s 1 out of 128.
Of the nine candidate counties, how many went for Trump in 2024? Door, Wisconsin? No, Harris won there with 10,564 to Trump’s 10,098 – a win by 466 votes, or 50.6 percent to 48.3 percent. I won’t step through them all, but Clay in Minnesota was won by Harris 16,121 to 15,965, or 49.2 percent to 48.8 percent.
Essex, New York, was equally close at 50.2 percent to 49.8 percent – but in Trump’s favor, maintaining the county’s streak of always picking the winner. In this case, by 72 votes. Meanwhile, 174 voters there wrote in someone else, waiving their chance to affect the winner. So that’s one county that kept the streak alive. Any others?
Blaine, Montana, gave Trump 1,501 votes to Harris’s 1,303, a 198-vote win, 51 percent to 44.2 percent.
And then there were two.
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