Wall Street Journal: Trump won critical counties

A WSJ analysis indicates that Trump isn’t off track in believing he actually won the 2020 election.

By Lauren Marcus, World Israel News

A new report by the Wall Street Journal revealed that President Trump won 18 out of 19 critical counties that have regularly predicted the election result.

These counties, known as bellwether counties, are often used as the standard to predict who will win a presidential election. Over the last 40 years, candidates who won the bellwether counties have always won the election.

According to the WSJ, Vigo County in Indiana, which Trump won, has voted for the election winner in every race since 1956.

Only twice since 1888 has the county voted for the candidate who did not win the election, in 1902 and 1952.

The single bellwether county won by Biden was Washington state’s Clallam County, in which he took the lead by just 3 points.

The WSJ reported that “only 2.5% of the nation’s counties flipped from one party in 2016 to the other in 2020,” usually by extremely narrow margins.

State bellwethers Ohio and Florida also went to Trump. Ohio has voted for the candidate who won the presidential election since 1896, with only two exceptions – in 1948 and 1960.

Some say that Ohio’s position as a bellwether is now in question, with decisive victories for Trump in 2016 and 2020 enough to declare the state as a Republican stronghold.

“The Democrats have really had four terrible elections in a row in Ohio,” Kyle Kondik, the author of a book titled The Bellwether: Why Ohio Picks the President, told AP.

“You can’t really sugarcoat it.”

“The bellwether has been unrung,” Mark Weaver, a Republican strategist, added. “Ohio, like most states, changes over time, and those changes have political impacts.”

VoteCast, a polling data group run by AP, found that in Ohio, 70 percent of registered voters who did not cast a ballot were under the age of 45.

A preliminary analysis from Tufts University found that Biden fared better with younger voters than Trump.