Donald Trump will likely win the GOP nomination, if the county that has been more correct than any other in its predictions of presidential elections is correct, according to a new article in Politico.
Vigo County, Indiana, has only miscalculated twice since 1888, voting for Williams Jennings Bryan instead of William Howard Taft in 1908 and selecting Adlai Stevenson rather than Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952.
That record prompted Dave Leip’s Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections, which examines bellwether states and counties, to state, “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.”
Boasting 108,000 residents who run the gamut from farmers to professors, with its nominal capital in Terre Haute, called the “Crossroads of America” by the citizens, the GOP leaners in the area seem enamored with Trump, according to Politico.
Politico reveals a few relevant facts: “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.” Since Democrats outnumber GOPers 3-1, the inference can be drawn that only a powerful candidate can swing the county toward the GOP.
For many, that candidate is Trump. 81-year-old Parker Eaton, a nominal Republican who voted for JFK and Bill Clinton, said that given the crop of candidates on both sides:
There’s only one: Trump. 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.
17-year-old Jared Potts echoed:
“He speaks his mind, and I think that might be what the country needs. 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.”
After the Republican mayor of Terre Haute, Duke Bennett, was elected, a celebratory event was held called Politics and Pies, at which virtually all the attendees expressed their support for Trump. As Politico reported, “ … if the Republican primary were held on this evening, and limited to Politics and Pies attendees, Trump would win, and handily.”
According to a recent poll of Indiana voters, Trump garnered 30% of respondents’ votes, leading the GOP field.
Read it all here.
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