America’s last real Bellwether County had a wrong election result

The country’s last true province has lost its status – after picking the wrong candidate for the presidential election for the first time in almost half a century.

In Tuesday’s election, Clallam County, population 78,000 in northwest Washington, had the longest track record in the country for correctly picking the winner.

This had been correct for eleven consecutive elections, since Ronald Reagan defeated the incumbent Democratic president Jimmy Carter by a landslide in 1980.

But the winning streak ended this year when voters chose vice president Kamala Harris by a margin of more than eight points – just to find her Republican opponent Donald Trump was declared the winner early Wednesday morning.

According to unofficial results from Tuesday’s elections in Clallam County, Harris received about 52.9 percent of the vote, while Trump received 44.4 percent.

About 22,042 ballots were cast for Harris, while 18,504 went to Trump, for a total of 41,943 ballots.

That didn’t reflect the outcome at the national level — forecasts predicted Trump had secured victories in enough battleground states to surpass the necessary 270 Electoral College votes and win the presidency early Wednesday morning.

Although votes are still being counted in some states, Trump is also leading the popular vote. As of 2:45 PM ET on Friday, he is ahead nationally by more than 4.3 million votes.

Marc Abshire, executive director of the Port Angeles Chamber of Commerce and a supporter of Harris, said Los Angeles Times that he was proud that Clallam County had supported the Democratic ticket this year.

“But we are also disappointed that this means we are losing our whistleblower status,” he told the newspaper. “Here we just didn’t have the mood of complaint that most of the rest of the country seemed to have.”

Clallam County has supported the losing candidate only three times in the past hundred years: in 1968, when voters favored Democrat Hubert Humphrey over the triumphant Richard Nixon, in 1976, when voters chose Republican Gerald. Fordabout winner Carter and in 2024.

But the county has trended blue in recent local, state and federal elections, as Northwest Public Broadcasting recently noted.

Although the county had supported the winning candidate in every election between 1980 and 2020, Republicans won six times and Democrats five times – the outcome of the recent elections was determined by narrow 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 won Barak Obama won by a margin of about 0.4 percentage points.