LF: Trump County, USA

America’s most reliable bellwether county has fallen for the wild man from New York.

The most accurate pundits in the history of American presidential politics reside far from the Beltway, on a 403-square mile patch of land along the western border of Indiana. At the intersections of U.S. Highways 40 and 41, and off Interstate 70, you find yourself in Vigo County, with its 108,000 residents and its ho-hum county seat, Terre Haute, situated along the Wabash River. Terre Haute is the land of Clabber Girl Baking Powder—and its citizens call it the “Crossroads of America.” It’s the place where both Democratic Sen. Evan Bayh and labor leader and Social Democratic Party founder Eugene Debs were born, and home to the U.S. penitentiary where the Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh died.

And, in nearly every presidential election since 1888, voters here in this blue-collar county have selected the winning candidate, missing only twice: Once, in 1908, when they opted for Williams Jennings Bryan instead of William Howard Taft, and again in 1952, when they chose Adlai Stevenson rather than Dwight D. Eisenhower.

“It’s obviously because of our extraordinary intelligence and good sense,” said Bayh, whose father built the family’s political dynasty here. “It’s classic middle America. Small businesses. Family farms. Community schools. We care more about common sense results than we do about party labels and ideology. … You don’t get the excesses of New York or California. We keep it between the 40-yard-lines.”

So, when it comes to 2016, you might expect these “between-the 40-yard-lines” voters to be soberly weighing the merits of Jeb Bush, Hillary Clinton and Marco Rubio, with maybe an occasional flirtation with Bernie Sanders or Mike Huckabee. And yet, when I spent two days traveling around its gathering places and watering holes, I discovered that, while the county’s Democrats have, for their part, coalesced around Clinton, its Republicans mostly wanted to talk about just one candidate: Donald Trump.

In America’s most prophetic county seat, Trump enjoys a diverse coalition of support, from the 17-year-old punk high school student on the eve of his first election to the 81-year-old Kennedy voter to the kind of folks who will reshuffle their Thursday night plans to attend a county GOP “Politics and Pies” event. Coastal pundits might lament Trump’s appeal to the “low information voter”—but I can tell you one thing: Terre Haute citizens are anything but poorly informed.

And if Trump can make it here—in this hollowed-out county of swing voters, union halls, three universities and a knot of CSX railroad lines, where voters seem to have a knack for predicting unpredictable elections—he can make it anywhere.

Vigo County’s status as a presidential bellwether is as much of a mystery to the people here as it is to you. It’s a local curiosity as inexplicable as that time a few years ago when Will Ferrell showed up here unannounced to make a series of commercials for Old Milwaukee beer, clogging the intersection of Wabash and 7th and walking aimlessly around its railroad tracks.

According to an analysis of bellwether states and counties by Dave Leip’s Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections, “Vigo County, Indiana is the most prominent bellwether of presidential elections in the country—voting for the winning candidate in every election from 1956 through 2012.” Perhaps even more telling, noted Leip, is that the margin between how candidates fair in Vigo County and how they fair nationwide has been an average of just 4 percent over the past 124 years.

Wizards on the Wabash River | Scenes from Vigo County, Indiana, where voters have accurately picked the winner of the presidential election all but twice since 1888. Residents keep their politics “between the 40-yard lines,” says former senator Evan Bayh. | BELLWETHER 2016 © 5 BLIND MEN+1

Bellwethers are bunk, as far as political scientists are concerned. In his 1975 paper “Are There Bellwether Electoral Districts?” the statistician Edward Tufte and one of his students, Richard A. Sun, analyzed returns from 14 presidential elections from 1916 to 1968 across all U.S. counties. They concluded that, despite apparent hot streaks, bellwether electoral districts didn’t exist.”

But Vigo County’s had quite a hot streak, and this mystery compelled documentarian Don Campbell to move from his Brooklyn home this past summer to Terre Haute, where he is living and investigating the bellwether phenomenon until next November as part of Bellwether 2016.

“It’s a pretty phenomenal record to go back to 1888 and only miss twice,” Campbell said. “I was also taken with this idea that they label themselves the ‘Crossroads of America.’ It’s not just that you have the intersection of old highways—but that you have an urban sector and a vital agricultural sector in one voting municipality. That’s rare in America today.”

In some ways, Vigo County is a lot like America: It has three universities, a mix of corporations and small businesses, a mall with a T.G.I Friday's. In other ways, it is not: It’s mostly white (88 percent of its residents, according to Census data), rural and poor (median income is $40,692, compared with $53,046, nationally).

Another thing that makes Vigo County unique is its apparent number of swing voters. Of its 76,981 registered voters, according to data from the Vigo County Voter Registration Office, 30,290 are Democrats, and 10,280 are Republican. And an eyebrow-raising 40,570 are unaffiliated or have never voted or only vote in generals. Consider how the county voted in the past two presidential elections. In 2012, for example, Barack Obama beat Mitt Romney by 339 votes, or about .85 percent of the vote. (The vote count was 19,707 to 19,368.) Four years earlier, Obama beat John McCain by 6,919 votes. That’s a roughly 15 percent shift in the vote.

“We pay attention, I guess,” said Karrum Nasser, 40, a restaurant owner and Democrat running for City Council, of his county’s winning streak.

As dusk fell on Election Day, the last of 8,000 voters—just 20 percent of the county’s 40,000 active voters—trickled into a polling place at a National Guard armory to vote in a tightly contested mayoral contest. Meanwhile, Nasser shilled for last-minute votes. He’s the kind of fiscally conservative Blue Dog Democrat who boosted Obama over McCain in 2008, and again in 2012. He’s volunteered over the years for candidates such as Bayh. And he’s a Clinton voter. “Bernie is a little bit closer to the left than what I’d like to see,” he said, “but anyone of the Democrats would be better than the alternative on the Republican side.”

Nasser would be among the very few reliably straight-ticket voters I could find in Terre Haute. “Here, there isn’t a big wide range of thinking when it comes to politics,” said Republican Mayor Duke Bennett. In other words, forget political polarization. In Vigo County, most voters, Republican or Democrat, tend to stick to the center.

Steps away from Nasser stood 81-year-old Parker Eaton, a Republican who said he’s not afraid to split tickets. (He’s voted for presidents such as Eisenhower, Bill Clinton, John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan.) “It’s a mystery to me,” said the retired high school principal of Vigo’s bellwether status. The last time Vigo broke its streak, voting for neighboring Illinois’ Gov. Adlai Stevenson over Eisenhower in 1952, then-18-year-old Eaton got it right, voting for Eisenhower.

Off the Beaten Campaign Trail | During a stop in Terre Haute, Sen. Evan Bayh introduces Sen. Obama during the 2008 presidential election. | Getty

This year, Eaton’s already made up his mind about which 2016 candidate he will support.

“There’s only one: Trump,” he said. “The reason why, in my opinion: He spends his own money. He’s not going to have any lobbyist or any high zillionaires that he has to do favors for, and I understand Clinton has already got millions of dollars from China and Japan and all them. So who in the hell does she owe favors to? If Trump got in, he doesn’t owe anybody. I haven’t heard him say one word that I don’t agree with. I don’t think he can do a lot of the things he said, but by God, he’s saying it.”

Later that night, the mayoral election was called for Bennett, who would go on to beat his Democratic opponent, Mark Bird, by 313 votes to become the first Republican mayor in Terre Haute to win three terms in the city’s history. It was a race he won, Terre Haute Democrats would later complain, by running as a “Democrat-Republican.”

“We’ve seen a change here where the people are voting more for the person than the party,” Bennett said while pacing outside of the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 85, awaiting his fate. “Just because there’s more Democrats doesn’t mean that we always vote Democratic.” It’s a trend that he believes could tip the county Republican in 2016.

Who does the Republican mayor like for president in 2016? “Obviously, Trump is kind of an outlier, and Ben Carson is, too. I think it’s wide open on the Republican side. I like Ted Cruz. He said a lot of things that make sense. I like Ben Carson, what he has to say.”

That’s not the beginning of a groaner, but a scene that actually played out at the Terre Haute Labor Council Candidate Night a week before Election Day. Randy Gentry, the Republican County Chair, received his first-ever written invitation to speak at the event. Gentry didn’t receive the warmest of receptions, but he chalked it up as progress toward turning this blue-leaning county a bit redder. “I got to break communication barriers,” he said. “You can’t lob grenades at each other and get anywhere. Could it sway somebody? It could open people’s eyes.”

Two weeks later, after the Fox Business Republican Debate in Milwaukee, Gentry and more than 60 Republicans gathered at the Grand Traverse Pie Company, situated off Bayh Way, a local thoroughfare named after the county’s first family. The optics, along with Bennett’s historic mayoral victory, pointed to the inroads Republicans are making into the traditionally Democrat stronghold.

They were there for an event called Politics and Pies, where they celebrated Bennett’s win, heard from U.S. Senate candidate Rep. Todd Young, and talked about which 2016 presidential candidates they favored.

Over grilled cheese sandwiches, chili and chicken noodle soup and their choice of several kinds of pie, ranging from apple to cherry, the county’s Republicans were quick to mention Carson as a well-liked candidate, and a few talked fondly of Cruz and Rubio. By far, though, the candidate they liked most was Trump.

Only one Republican interviewed spoke negatively of Trump (“I think he’s a Democrat mole!” said Vernon Wester, 51, a technician, who said he liked Rubio.) No Carson supporters present were bothered by recent questions about the veracity of his biographical claims (“Not a bit,” said Phil Padgett, a facilities manager. “Let’s face it I’m 71. I tried to think back 50 years ago, and I can’t remember every detail”). No other Republican candidates were mentioned on this night. No Bush. No Chris Christie. No Mike Huckabee.

The people gathered at Grand Traverse weren’t the political neophytes and gadflies often chalked up as Trump voters. They were the kind of people who scuttled their Thursday night plans to come to a two-hour event organized by a low-key Republican county chairman. And if the Republican primary were held on this evening, and limited to Politics and Pies attendees, Trump would win, and handily.

Take Dick and Jane Ames, both 72, for example. The retired air traffic controller and insurance agent who met when they were in high school here are sold on Trump. “He said what I want to hear, and I believe him,” Jane said. “He’s such a good business person, and we need that.” (She did admit, though, that Rubio has a “a cute smile.”)

Dick said he’s not afraid to vote for a Democrat. He voted for Kennedy, after all.

But for Dick, 2016 is different. “Democrats don’t have anybody. One’s a communist, and Clinton should be in jail.”

And then there was 17-year-old Jared Potts, who wore gray contacts that turned his pupils into pinholes, who will turn 18 next September, and plans to vote for Trump in his first election in November. “He speaks his mind, and I think that might be what the country needs,” he said. “A lot of the presidents don’t really enforce what needs to happen, they just do whatever the country feels like. Other countries just say, ‘do this, do that.’ Trump is just like, ‘no, I want this.’ He doesn’t owe anybody anything. Marco Rubio is paid for. Donald Trump is a self-made person.”

Crossroads of America | Vigo County’s nickname fits not only for its reputation as the country’s political weather vane—it sits at the intersections of U.S. Highways 40 and 41, completed in 1926. | BELLWETHER 2016 © 5 BLIND MEN+1

Gentry, the county chair, said it’s far too early to say which candidate will win his county in Indiana’s Republican primary next May—let alone who will win the general election next fall.

But there’s one image Gentry can’t get out of his head. Sitting at the Republican booth at the Vigo County Fair this summer, he fielded endless requests for Trump campaign swag.

“All I ever heard about was Trump,” Gentry said. “The people who came into the fairgrounds said, ‘Can I have a Trump button? Can I have a Trump sign?’ At that point, he was just kind of starting this whole thing out. If you poll people on the street here, Trump would be a very strong candidate here right now. Carson’s doing really well, too. I don’t hear Rubio’s name very much here. … The top two names I hear are Trump and Carson ... but it’s so early in the process.”

Still, for a county famous for its large share of undecided voters, there is little indecision in Vigo County a year before the election.

In fact, the biggest conundrum in Vigo County Thursday among voters at Politics and Pie wasn’t about who they wanted to be the next leader of the free world. That matter was settled. It should be Trump—maybe Carson.