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LEFT WING LOONS Title: how smart is that ... voting for the muslim - marxist - anti christ 2 x's --- jimmy clown carter too ! Trump County, USA America’s most reliable bellwether county has fallen for the wild man from New York. By Adam Wren December 04, 2015 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. 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. Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/12/2016-indiana-county-predicts-every-election-trump-fever-213411#ixzz3tNU4TtOK Poster Comment: I'm not totally happy about making America great again ... we have the community minority organizer to thank --- for this too ! Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread |
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